THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO

• Starring Chloe Sevigny, Kate Beckinsale and Chris Eigeman
• Directed by Whit Stillman
• Rated R, with profanity and implied sex; running time 113 minutes
• With 10 as a must-see, Jack gives this film a 4

By Jack Garner
Democrat and Chronicle film critic

(June 12, 1998) -- Have you ever tried to talk in a disco? It's a miracle if the bartender can hear your drink order over the pulsating rhythms.

Yet in The Last Days of Disco, the characters in this club talk. And talk and talk. Dancing is an afterthought.

Trouble is, the dancing is usually more interesting than the pretentious things these characters have to say. Oh, how they prattle on about their yuppie ambitions and shallow romances.

The Last Days of Disco is the latest from Whit Stillman, a writer-director clearly obsessed with the days of his preppie youth.

The last of his prep trilogy to hit the screen, Disco fits chronologically between Metropolitan, a 1990 saga about preppies and debutantes, and Barcelona, a 1994 tale of wealthy American twentysomethings, living abroad.

In Disco, the same sort of characters are starting their Manhattan careers and taking their first dips in the city's social whirl, circa the early '80s.

Meanwhile, they debate the virtues of group social life vs. "ferocious pairing off."

Some of the conversations occur in the narrow "railroad apartments" in which they live and around the desks where they work at entry-level publishing house jobs.

The prime setting, though, is a fictional nightclub fashioned after Studio 54, Xenon or the revived El Morocco of the period.

A subplot suggests the sort of drug problems and questionable financial dealings that made Studio 54 infamous -- and will be central to the disco-era movie 54, due later this summer.

But Disco dismisses the drugs, casual sex and other habits a bit too casually. Instead of being signposts of the era, they're mere punctuation in the volumes of endless, often pointless talk.

Stillman seems to have created most of the male characters in Disco with a cookie cutter -- they look alike, sound alike and are alike.

Only Chris Eigeman manages to stand out a bit. A Stillman regular, Eigeman appears here as Des, an assistant manager of the disco who's unwilling to commit to any romantic involvement beyond a one-night stand.

The female characters fare a bit better, with Kate Beckinsale as an irritating, self-centered snob, and Chloe Sevigny as her naive but daring roommate.

Sevigny, a talented newcomer first seen in a tragic role in 1995's Kids, is the only flesh-and-blood character amid the cardboard. She's the only person we care about in the film.

As you'd expect, The Last Days of Disco also pays homage to the music of the time. Its 22 hit songs are mostly from the more credible R&B end of the disco spectrum, sung by people like the O'Jays and Harold Melvyn and the Blue Notes.

If only these shallow folks would shut up and dance.