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Charlotte encourages Alice to pursue a sexual relationship, with Tom (Robert Sean Leonard), a young Harvard grad, environmental lawyer, and idealist who loves intellectual women. She’s also one of two characters who sings “Amazing Grace.”īut she’s a bad friend to Alice, treating her in a shameful, contemptuous way under guise of friendship. She’s been bruised and, though it is hard to sympathize with her, she’s the only character who seems to know how terrible it is to be needy and unloved. She knows her parents divorced because of an excess of a bad equality-they kept criticizing each other. She has faced up to the Sexual Revolution and she’s making the best of it she can. It’s not the 50s anymore, she says.Ĭharlotte is charming because she is all worldly knowledge, no self-knowledge. She works with Alice, convinces her they should move in together (the only way they can afford Manhattan), and irresponsibly encourages Alice to be sexually active. The only help she gets is from the charmingly conceited Charlotte, played by Kate Beckinsale. They seem both undeserved and inevitable, because society simply isn’t set up to help young women.
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Unlike her ridiculous career, Alice’s love life is actually interesting, and we not only follow her misadventures, but sympathize with her in her suffering and humiliations. In a restless America, any pose of confident serenity will sell… When the obvious fraud comes up, she just switches the genre from non-fiction to self-help: it turns out, knowing the facts doesn’t make us any less gullible or less crazy for Zen. Moreover, her career success consists in publishing the book of the fake brother of the Dalai Lama. She mocks whoever wrote Spiderman and comic book fans, but she’s about as uneducated as they are, despite her greater opportunities. She is by no means perfect-and she is too passive, relying on others for the parties and fun she craves. Alice, pretty, smart, and feminine, seems an alien in this world-she is our protagonist because she’s quiet and shy, which reveals, in contrast, the madness of the times. America, the land of the free, is one big mystery for them, and they are aware of the scary likelihood that they will fail. They don’t really know anything about love, nor about the future. They are the first American generation to grow up with the Sexual Revolution, and their lives are a mess, which is Stillman’s quiet theme. If you give the story some thought, it’s possible to imagine a slew of other possible romantic comedies with these characters in various configurations. Stillman does a great, understated job of showing us recognizable human types and the pairs they might make, with the good and bad likely to issue from each coupling. The story shows us her preferences and options in men, as well as her only female friend. Disco, she believes, is her chance to win admiration, have fun, meet her friends, and find love. She’s a reader in a publishing house in Manhattan, a graduate of a prestigious school, and completely lacking in wherewithal. The Last Days of Disco shows us the lives and loves of several young college graduates trying to make something of themselves in New York in “the very early 80s.” Our heroine is the demure Alice, played by Chloe Sevigny. We’re as much in need of wit and romance as ever, but since the romantic comedy has disappeared from today’s Hollywood, we must look back to this classic and the work of the living master of the love story.
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This summer marks the 20th anniversary of The Last Days of Disco, the Whit Stillman romantic comedy that made the case for the disco as the last iconic American venue for music, dance, drinks, and conversation-in short, for the sentimental education of young Americans.