Inside the Box – Episode 14 – A Whit Stillman Trilogy

In this episode of Inside the Box, Trevor and David discuss A Whit Stillman Trilogy, featuring the films Metropolitan, Barcelona, and The Last Days of Disco.

Trevor Berrett and David Blakeslee are pleased to present Inside the Box, a podcast series that explores the riches in the various box sets released by The Criterion Collection. In this episode, they discuss A Whit Stillman Trilogy. This untraditional box set contains the films Metropolitan (1990), Barcelona (1994), and The Last Days of Disco (1998).

Over the course of the 1990s, writer-director Whit Stillman made a trilogy of films about the acid tongues and broken hearts of some haplessly erudite young Americans in New York and abroad. Set in the eighties, these films trace the arc of that decade, led by Stillman’s Oscar-nominated debut, Metropolitan,which introduced moviegoers to a strange, endangered species of privileged New Yorker, the “urban haute bourgeoisie.” Chronologically, the tale continues with The Last Days of Disco, in which, with an earnest wink, Stillman mourns the close of New York’s nightclub era via the story of two young party-going women juggling day jobs in book publishing. Finally, Barcelona plunks down a pair of love-starved upper-class men in a foreign city rife with anti-American sentiment. At once effervescent and melancholy, these are comedies about the ends of cultural moments, social change as seen through the eyes of reluctant, unflaggingly sardonic romantics.

A Whit Stillman Trilogy

Metropolitan
Barcelona
The Last Days of Disco

Whit Stillman — Wikipedia
Whit Stillman’s Top 10 Criterion Releases

Episode Credits

Trevor Berrett (Twitter/Website)
David Blakeslee (Twitter/Website)