The End Is the Beginning Is the End: Whit Stillman: Not So Long Ago

In 1989, with a budget of a quarter-million dollars, Whit Stillman couldn’t afford to make a true period piece, which is why Metropolitan is vaguely set “not so long ago.” This phrase, tinged with the melancholy that imbues the film, also serves as the title for a modest new companion to Stillman’s career, Whit Stillman: Not So Long Ago, which features a long interview, critical essays by Serge Bozon, Charlotte Garson, Félix Rehm, and Beatrice Loayza, and a dossier of materials from the production of Metropolitan put together by Haden Guest.

Also included in the book are some of Stillman’s writings from various magazines (mostly book reviews), but anyone hoping for a fount of the filmmaker’s prose waiting to be discovered will be disappointed, as these brief pieces are mostly disposable. The real value of Not So Long Ago is found in the lengthy conversation between Stillman and the book’s editor, Cyril Neyrat, and in the thoughtful examinations of the former’s work that follow.

The contributors usually avoid saying the most obvious things about their subject. Stillman is one of those filmmakers who, like the “quirky” Wes Anderson, comes with a prepackaged set of adjectives, so it’s something of an accomplishment that the word “witty” appears only once in the entire book—in a piece written by the man himself. Nor is he portrayed, for better or worse, as a “conservative” filmmaker, despite National Review’s many attempts over the years to claim Stillman for their own. As Nick Pinkerton says in his comprehensive introduction, Stillman is “a connoisseur of the sport of intellectual jousting, not an ideologue in recruitment mode.”

It isn’t that reading Stillman’s films as conservative in their orientation is inaccurate. Rather, it’s reductive, as that fails to account for the distinctive qualities that make them both enjoyable and worthy of analysis in the first place. Part of this stems from how powerfully Stillman depicts the passage of time, especially in the famous triptych of films—Metropolitan, Barcelona, and The Last Days of Disco—with which he established himself in the 1990s. Each film takes place during a moment when one tradition or way of life is giving way to another, but it would be a mistake to read any of them as merely reactionary. As Stillman says in his conversation with Neyrat, “the end of things isn’t sad. It’s the beginning of something else. Some people think that my films are nostalgic because they show the end of debutante balls, the end of the Cold War, the end of disco, as if these were things one regrets ending. But there was no regret when the Cold War ended. On the contrary, the years 1989 to 1991 were a moment of change, of hope.”

The Last Days of Disco drew critical appreciation but was a poor earner in theaters, and it would be over a decade before Stillman made another film, 2011’s Damsels in Distress, with his Jane Austen adaptation Love & Friendship following in 2016. Loayza’s piece on the former is the strongest of the four essays included here in part due to its concentration on one film. The other three, while frequently insightful, meander and could have benefitted from a narrower focus.

With Pinkerton’s introduction covering Stillman’s entire career, some of the redundancy found in the essays might have been avoided if each writer had taken on one clearly defined aspect of his work. For one, there’s room in the book for a piece on Stillman’s two novels (which are based on The Last Days of Disco and Love & Friendship, respectively), or one that discussed his pilot for the Amazon series The Cosmopolitans, which is mentioned only once. Perhaps it was Stillman’s wish for the latter to be ignored, but with under 10 hours’ worth of celluloid to his name, even one episode of an aborted television series is worthy of consideration.

The biggest surprises in the book come in the Metropolitan dossier. Among the assorted materials is a priceless letter from novelist Patricia Highsmith, in which she praises Stillman as a “snob” whose film stood above the other “rubbish” at the Locarno Film Festival, where it won the Silver Leopard. Perhaps Highsmith saw the character of Tom Townsend as a Ripley-esque social climber (though, in one of Stillman’s handwritten notes for the film, he envisions it as “Holden Caulfield goes to a deb party,” suggesting a less mercenary temperament).

There’s never been anything timely about Stillman’s films. At one point in the book, he comments that an artist needs about 15 years to process real-life events before turning them into art. Thus, while Not So Long Ago is connected with a Stillman retrospective that took place at FIDMarseille in July, this nearly pocket-sized book, roughly the dimensions of a Zagat guide, is refreshingly self-contained. There’s no new film or larger cultural trend to capitalize on, just a publisher taking the initiative to gather some sharp writers together at a time when film criticism, particularly of the printed variety, has been sharply devalued. That’s an endeavor worthy of approbation, and Stillman is a subject deserving of such thoughtful treatment.

Whit Sillman: Not So Long Ago is available on September 11 from Fireflies Press.