The Master of Sophisticated Comedy

If you’ve always wondered about the selective kinship between Woody Allen and Wes Anderson films, then Whit Stillman is your missing link. “Metropololitan”, Stillman’s first self-penned feature, made quite the entrance in 1990, eradicating everything you ever knew about indie comedies with its radical mixture of humor, quirkiness and social criticism. His style – already heavily evolved for a first-time director – included brilliant, lightning-fast dialogue almost a decade before Aaron Sorkin imposed his Oscar-winning rhythm, a highly stylized approach and a self-referential attitude that’s now adopted by even the lowest-common-denominator sitcoms that would like to believe they’re being sarcastic. He followed up this scathingly and totally hilarious criticism of New York prepsters with Euro-cool “Barcelona” (1994) and the ambitious “The Last Days of Disco” (1998). Although this last film didn’t do as well as expected at the box office, one viewing is enough to convince you that great minds are usually ahead of their time. With one-liners flying faster than a speeding bullet and vitriolic dialogues perfectly capable of dissecting an entire era in under two minutes, Stillman cemented his reputation as a zeitgeist auteur with a clear inclination towards artificial universes and blatantly staged microcosms, reminiscent of the theater. It would take 12 long years for the director to grace us with his next movie: a series of misfortunes, delays and projects that fell through the cracks postponed “Damsels in Distress” until 2011, when he was finally able to provide us with the perfect excuse to pay tribute to his career. “Dawn in the big city. There are eight million stories out there,” says Nick, one of the main characters in “Metropolitan”. Well, Whit Stillman knows them all and he’ll hopefully share a lot more of them in the near future…

Phaedra Vokali