[Film Review] Metropolitan (1990) 7.6/10

Make-believe posing and posturing is part and parcel of acting, professionals need years of practice to excel in it, for amateurs who tread the boards for the very first time (METROPOLITAN is a case in point), the result can be a toss-up and to a great extent contingent on its director’s aptitude to key their personal traits into the roles they are assigned to play, in that regard, Whit Stillman makes an exemplar specimen with his very first feature film, a less neurotic, more self-possessed leisure-class confab-fest a là Woody Allen.

Set in the present day of Manhattan’s debutante season circa Christmas time, a secluded group of Upper East State preppies, the so-called “Sally Fowler Rat Pack”, welcomes an initiate named Tom Townsend (Clements), a Princeton student who is a rung lower than the rest, among which Audrey Rouget (Farina) has been secretly carrying a torch for him, but Tom still hasn’t got over his popular ex-girlfriend Serena (Thompson), who is not included in the group though, and prioritizes the latter over Audrey during one outing, which causes some dissension among the rat pack, that aside, Tom is gradually eased into the group by a cynical Nick Smith (Eigeman), whose snarky remarks about a young titled baron Rick Von Sloneker (Kempe), do not strike the right chord with other members of the group, particularly Cynthia (Gillies), and he starts to lose his credit after fabulating a harrowing story to authenticate Rick’s womanizing vice. After giving some introspection of his own actions, and parsing his true feelings for Audrey, a guileless Tom dreads that he has obliquely driven her into the arms of Rick, as a last resort, accompanied by the philosophy-obsessed Charlie Black (Nichols), he drops by Rick’s beach house to rescue Audrey, only to find out that Audrey isn’t a clueless damsel-in-distress, thankfully, his heroic gesture seems to work in his favor at any rate.

Enfolded in a beguilingly vintage, subdued golden hue and jazz-infused incidental music, METROPOLITAN ages resplendently well with its sophisticated candor and stimulating burrowing into the mentation of a certain cross-section, which doesn’t necessarily pall into neither undue self-aggrandizement, self-absorption, nor self-lamentation (either ways has killed the mumblecore fad by now), each and every character is sedulously designed with a rounded representation like a real-life person with both charms and defects (although their ratio varies drastically from individual to individual), Audrey’s bashful nature cannot blot out a bracing mixed whiff of self-sufficiency and fragile sensibility (rubbed off from Jane Austen’s novels for sure), Tom has a boyish innocuousness that is very congenial, but his own wet-behind-the-ear, insular cognition of the vast world is troublesome for his age, and indeed, they do make a compatible and complementary couple.

Nichols flogs Charlie’s pedantic verbiage to death with both barrels, but also betrays his pedantic geekiness with an aroma of benign openness, but it is Eigeman, who stands out among the entire ensemble with a telegenic patina that is few and far between for a tenderfoot, who is able to telegraph that unpretentious feeling of being brutally honest, yet synchronically struts his character’s off-putting self-righteousness, a fascinating performance which leaves Nick sorely missed after his symbolic departure at the train station in the wee hours, therein the proto-bromance between Nick and Tom is acutely pointed and artfully downplayed at once by Stillman, who magnificently breaks his duck with an authorial signature, notwithstanding it is predominantly seen through an unbalanced lens of a boy’s club.

referential entries: Stillman’s THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO (1996, 7.0/10); LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP (2016, 7.2/10).