Stillman: Metropolitan (1990)

A late masterpiece of the Gilded Age, Whit Stillman’s debut feature revolves around the last remaining pool of Old New York – the “Sally Fowler Rat Pack,” a group of aristocratic debutantes living on the Upper East Side. Although it’s nominally about what happens when a sceptical socialist joins their ranks, it’s really a taxonomy of a species in decline, a study in downward mobility that wryly admits that it’s only low-budget, independent cinema that can afford to cater to such a small, privileged demographic (the difference in intended audience from The Age of Innocence, released a few years later, couldn't be starker). More attuned to the 1890s than the 1990s, Stillman creates a costume drama set in the present, or at least condenses the present to a few rooms where divorce is still the latest cusp in public scandal, and the telephone is still greeted with a certain wonder and incredulity. As in Edith Wharton, that tends to contract – or perhaps expand – New York to a series of vestibular spaces, gilt wildernesses that manage to encapsulate the outdoors at its most agoraphobic and the indoors at its most claustrophobic, suspending us between carpet and chintz, setting us adrift among aristocrats who only really experience the city proper in montage, from a taxi window or the steps of a hotel. And, like the best montage sequences, this city’s connective tissue unfolds as a series of waiting rooms, antechambers for an aristocratic adulthood that is clearly never going to arrive. That might sound unbearably cloistered, but Stillman has a beautiful way of cutting a scene just before it ossifies, usually just as someone’s on the verge of that last stilted utterance that would turn everything to stone. Taking a breath with each cut, the film sustains the aristocracy even as it mourns them, constrains them even as it provides them with one last burst of energy, illluminating them from within like congealing amber. If they need the film, then the film also needs them – most of the actors are drawn from the film’s milieu, and none enjoyed crossover success – meaning that they’re never quite remote or present enough to feel wholly comic or tragic. Instead, this exquisite array of hand-drawn, handwritten shots feels like an elegy for the melancholy resignation that the aristocracy can only display by declining, a bittersweet bathos you can almost only recognise in retrospect. As one of the group's spokesmen puts it, they're not doomed to failure, but failing without being doomed, and it’s exactly that failure that Stillman has managed to make so wonderfully his own.