Rent Metropolitan (1990)

Address Codes - Metropolitan review by CH

Jeunesse dorée. Gilded youth has been a part of every generation. Over thirty years ago, in Metropolitan (1990) some of those on Manhattan’s Upper East Side were back from college for the Christmas vacation, their haunts various bars and sofa-laden apartments. Here is much talk less profound to anybody listening in than to those sparring with one another to appear informed and languid.

Written and directed by Whit Stillman, it was made on a small budget, and met with success. Audiences divided into those who saw it as a latter-day incarnation of Scott Fitzgerald and those who thought it bluntly indulged those who vapoured on about lives which turned in and around dating.

It is not so much a comedy as a mood, even perhaps a short story which has become unduly elaborated. At its core is somebody (Edward Clements) who has come in their orbit despite living in a small place the other side of the Park. He forms something of a friendship with bespectacled Chris Eigman who elaborates his theories of class distinction while in the room there come and go women talking of Jane Austen - and there are more references to critic Lionel Trilling than is is good for the soul.

For all the panoply of romance, the essence of the film is that disappointment beckons. Men as much as women are shaken when realising that not only putative love but groups of apparent friends are a staging post. The horses are untied and the caravan goes separate ways.

Others will have found the same after coming of age and more in the decades since their infancy at the time of the film’s release - and even made films about it.

Clever and Catchy Drama - Metropolitan review by JS

I very much liked this film for its cleverness and catchy humour throughout. It gently sent up the New York Preppie class but in such a way that you still liked them and were on their side.