The Last Days of Disco (1998) * * *

Directed by:  Whit Stillman

Starring:  Kate Beckinsale, Chloe Sevigny, Matt Ross, Chris Eigeman

Things change and nothing lasts forever, not even disco, although such a truth actually takes the characters here by surprise.     Disco and disco nightclubs like Studio 54 were so popular that it seemed the light would never stop shining on them.     Who doesn't want to listen to feel-good music and dance all night long every night?    After a while, many people.    As one character says in The Last Days Of Disco,  "People are tired.   They're strung out."    The popularity of disco gave way to the inevitable backlash and then its decline.     "Disco Demolition Night" was a rally held in Chicago in 1979 and, capitalizing on the backlash, encouraged people to destroy their disco records.    It nearly turned into a riot.    People kept dancing, just not to disco.

Whit Stillman's The Last Days Of Disco focuses on a group of friends who graduated from college in the late-1970s and tried to make their mark in New York of "the very early 1980s"    To women like Charlotte (Beckinsale) and Alice (Sevigny), they showed up at nightclubs because they were the place to be and young women were expected to be there.     Being allowed in to places like Studio 54 reinforced their self-image.     They dance and meet guys, but mostly they're happy that they've socially "arrived" by being in the club in the first place.  

Charlotte is the more talkative of the two; dispensing advice on how to behave in a nightclub as if she were some sort of expert herself.     Alice is quieter, looking for love, and after a few false starts, thinks she finds it in the form of Des (Eigeman), who works at the club although his function is mostly getting yelled at for letting in his "undesirable advertising friends".    Des is kind of a lout and so lacks the courage to be honest with women that he breaks up with them by stating, "I just found out I'm gay."    He claims he discovered this by watching Wild Kingdom.    When confronted by an angry former squeeze he dumped using this pretense, she asks, "Have you ever had sex with a man?"  He responds by accusing her of narrowly defining homosexuality as just having sex with men.     Des is straight and uses the gay angle because he has run out of legitimate excuses to dump his one-night stands.    

Both Charlotte and Alice work for a publishing company as the peons who read the hundreds of unsolicited manuscripts that come pouring in.    They aspire to be "associate editors" because in the publishing world of the early 80's, this must've been where the big bucks were, or where they thought they were.      They yearn to have an apartment, even a "railroad" one, which means someone has to walk through two bedrooms in order to get to the bathroom.   Or, if they desire, they can exit one door of the very long apartment, walk down the hall, and then re-enter in another door.     They take it, but it quickly cramps everyone's style when they bring home their boyfriends.    

The Last Days Of Disco works well at convincingly capturing the mood of the early 80's pre-AIDS epidemic era, when herpes was considered the worst of all possible STD's.     Shades of the eventual fate of Studio 54 are alluded to, as the unnamed nightclub attended by the characters becomes a warehouse for laundering and embezzlement.     Cocaine use goes from recreational to rampant, especially for Des, who feels great pressure juggling all of his lies.      Sometimes, the dialogue and conversations become too elliptical, as if Stillman was too in love with his work to cut any of it out.    Many of these conversations are held in the nightclub, where the characters use their inside voices when the blaring music should be forcing them to shout at the top of their lungs.     It's not appealing to hear people shouting at each other, so this sacrifice of realism had to be made.

The people here couldn't possibly see ahead to AIDS, yuppie materialism, and Reaganomics.   They live in the moment, caring only about what makes them happy now and I suppose that's true of most people.    The crowds outside of Studio 54 grew smaller and the thrill of being allowed past the velvet rope into the club became less and less.    A character named Jan, who acted as the cold, ruthless bouncer that held a person's social status in his hands at the velvet rope, sums up that the bottom fell out on disco and places like Studio 54 outlived their usefulness.      Like disco, youth goes away as quickly as it arrived.