Thursday, June 11, 2009

Disco Will Never Die

(for Girish)

Watching The Last Days of Disco on Hulu earlier, my second time after a decade had passed*, I very much enjoyed, and was most surprised by, the sense of timing. Time, and timing, are too rarely brought up by cinephiles and critics. Whether in evaluative or descriptive terms, the dimension of temporality seems to be a rarefied artifact of cinema (despite the fact that all cinema must exist in time): we can speak of the timing of a comic gag, or narrative/dramatic pacing in the style of Syd Field (that's for PWC). Certain long-take masters like Tarkovsky may invite us to think of the image in temporal terms. And people are hardpressed to discuss His Girl Friday and certain other films without at least acknowledging the fast pace of action and diction. Still, specific instances of what happens "in" a cut, of how a series of images flows, sometimes beg for unpacking, for savoring, on the level of time every bit as much as of space.

About an hour and a half into The Last Days of Disco, Alice (Chloe Sevigny) is on a coffee date with Des (Chris Eigeman). They are discussing their mutual friend, and Des' potential romantic rival, Josh (Matt Keeslar). Stillman is a connoisseur of facial tics and body language, both in screenplay but also in images: as Des nonchalantly trashes his lunatic buddy's good name, a fair amount of the image focuses on Sevigny's face, catching her reactions (which are subtle, constrained). Des tries to snort coffee after he has just questioned Josh's mental stability; cut to a cup of coffee, and there's another meeting, this one between Alice and Josh. The time between cuts is uncertain, but also unimportant. What I mean is that the specificity of this particular cut may not be so important. The gestalt is masterfully clarified by moment-to-moment obscurities. Stillman arranges a dramatically clean ensemble storyline, but unlike, say, Neil Labute in the contemporaneous In the Company of Men, the quotidian lunches, dinners, nights out, etc., are not subordinated to rather grim schematics. Stillman gets his yuppies to breathe, to pulse, to contradict themselves.

(Muriel Spark's narrator Fleur Talbot, in Loitering with Intent: "Contradictions in human character are one of its most consistent notes ...")

Stillman is utterly merciless towards his characters, giving no quarter when it comes to showing their flaws and shortcomings. Their "life," though (and Stillman's "generosity") comes in how he stitches together this group portrait. Part of this has to do with his deft handling of time:

in terms of the characters' sketchily but sophisticatedly evoked relationship to their pasts (days at Harvard, Hampshire, Sag Harbor; frequently connected, in these yuppies' cases, with parochial privilege),

in terms of their cramped, barren, predictable quotidian time (office work, nights lived for the weekends) reflected by their living spaces and offices,

in terms of their their slower, only aspirationally linear experience through post-college professional life (a title card like 'spring'), announcing progress made, visible, but never felt in the making,

in terms of cuts that leave us stranded from moment to moment before an image, periodically unsure of whether we have been pushed forward to the next shot in a scene, a new scene, a montage sequence. I think Roger Ebert promoted the advice, or something like it, that in a good film you can tell how much time has taken place between shots. I don't think this is true at all. Stillman is an example of a director, here at least, who uses these mild and continuous indeterminacies to make palpable the progression of time.

Like Linklater or Hartley, Stillman invests his speakers with a distinctive cast of speaking. Like a great deal of independent film of this generation, there is dialogue devoted to the analysis of pop culture, dropped titles and names as cultural capital, a sort of generational/class code drawn upon like a fund, at times: to lubricate conversation, to cement or clarify a relation (Wild Kingdom), or alternately to sow discord (The Lady and the Tramp). Stillman (in contrast to, say, Tarantino, whose method is very different) makes explicit the social fabric in which this kind of analytical savvy is embedded. But where Tarantino imagines savvy people in pulp roles, the interplay of fiction/fantasy/genre and particular codes of realism, in Stillman (at least Last Days of Disco) it is the experience of this pop culture that is important, and important to depict, not the mixing of codes of reality and unreality. That's why the jokingly climactic "disco will never die" speech is ironic for its speaker as well as for us, and simultaneously touching.

In summary, a very impressive film, and one that I remember liking but surely didn't understand at all when I saw it ten years ago.

* This is the only Whit Stillman film I've seen, I must admit, though that will be remedied soon enough.

10 comments:

girish said...

Thanks, Zach! I've seen this film several times but had never considered looking at through the lens of time & temporality. As so frequently before, you take something that may be familiar to us and show us new and thought-provoking ways into it.

The other two Stillmans are also well worth your time: Chris Eigeman, in particular, makes for a connecting thread through all three films.

Jaime said...

Stillman: There are those who regret his apparent withdrawal from film (I can still recall anticipating a new WS in 2002, as he'd made a feature every four years like clockwork), but you have to wonder about how long it would take before he would've been recruited to make a $120 million-budgeted superhero movie.

Not that there's anything wrong with that...

ZC said...

Thanks for the comments, Girish & Jaime. I should get Metropolitan in a few days from Netflix. I'm excited to see it as I understand Audrey Rouget (prodigy FSG editor who appears in a non-speaking role at Disco's club) is one of the mains in Metropolitan--characters who cross films, in even marginal ways, are an interesting phenomenon. Apparently Stillman's working on eventually doing Little Green Men ...

Adrian said...

Great reflection, Zach (on a a film I have forced myself to watch several times, and really dislike! What an 'unmusical' director Stillman is, for me! The dance club scenes are really awful to my eyes and ears). Ebert's advice is a croc - you're absolutely right, the temporal ambiguity of cuts is a major area of fascination. Claire Denis is a master of this; it's what one critic calls her 'archipelago' style of structuring a film, where the fiction arises from the ambiguous sequencing of shots - not (as usual, or as in Ebert land) where the shots are executed to illustrate the pre-scripted fiction.

Adrian said...

Odd Aussie PS: Stillman used to work for a Spanish film export company (hence the setting for BARCELONA), and most of the glossy Spanish films that used to appear on a local 'world movies' channel were handpicked for our viewing by him !!

adrian said...

PPS But you are right, Zach - indeed, Disco Will Never Die !!! Have you seen STan Lathan's BEAT STREET (1984), now there's a real movie ... a rare 'mainstream' film in which mass-community grief gets a progressive political charge as it gathers (which I have always thought was the great triumph of Latin American political cinema of the 60s, films that are SO musical on every level ... )

ZC said...

Beat Street! Yes! I posted the subway dance battle on my facebook account a while back, in fact. If memory serves I first saw the film in a class taught by Elena Gorfinkel in undergrad. "Let's do the right thing, let's serve these dudes, man!"

(Musicality in Latin American political cinema: one of the most indelible aspects of Hour of the Furnaces is that percussion!)

The club scenes in Last Days of Disco are weird because they're so quiet, aren't they? It's easy for characters to talk to one another. (James Gray gets the pounding pulse of the dance floor with more verisimilitude.) I chalked it up to Stillman's intentional stylistic decision ...

Peter Nellhaus said...

I've only seen Last Days of Disco during its initial theatrical run, and then caught most of it again on cable a few years ago. It still held up for me perhaps because it is so time and place specific. Still I have a bit of a block regarding the fact that most of the time the characters can have extended conversations in the club, unlike my own experiences of shouting a few words and being shouted at in order to be understood.

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky said...

I think Stillman gets his sense of club scenes from Rohmer. Did anyone but Rohmer ever manage to get parties, especially ones with dancing, seem so contrived? Have you ever tried to dance somewhere where the music was quiet -- you become so self-conscious. You begin to realize every movement you're making, sometimes in sociological terms, and you feel false. It's not that Stillman is actively non-musical -- it's that he wants to understand the club on terms other than the sensory. I prefer Gray's nightclubs, but I respect Stillman's -- though Denis' are still the best.

Clenbuterol said...

You've touched a very interesting theme. I have also noticed this effect