Metropolitan

The other night, I watched Whit Stillman's 1990 film Metropolitan, a small work with no recognizable actors which whimsically glorifies class privilege. Set during a time "not so long ago" (but really in the late 60s, early 70s), it depicts the end of a golden age—the years of upper bourgeois Manhattan youth attending balls and dinners every night during the Christmas holidays, staying up all night playing bridge and bantering intellectually.

I probably should have hated it, but I found it inescapably charming. Metropolitan is somewhat like a Wes Anderson film, capturing the same sense of deeply threatened innocence, though replacing Anderson's quirkiness with Stillman's pretentiousness (which is a wonderful swap in my opinion).

Anyway, this is a wonderful interview with the director from the Onion AV Club. Metropolitan was just released by the Criterion Collection on DVD. I highly recommend it.