Metropolitan · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A young man stands in a doorway in a rented dinner jacket with a raincoat over it. The coat is wrong. Too thin for a New York winter, everyone can see it, and nobody mentions it, because mentioning it is not what these people do. Behind him the room is warm and lamplit. In front of him the street is blue and deep and he is about to be very small in it, waiting for a cab.

That doorway is the whole film. Whit Stillman's Metropolitan runs on a difference of two temperatures. John Thomas lit the interiors with the apartments' own lamps, so the parties glow like something already being remembered, while the exteriors are cold and open, figures lost against Manhattan snow. Deleuze distinguishes the out-of-field you could walk into, the next room, the coat check, from one located nowhere in space: a sense that the frame opens onto a larger whole that is changing. What lies outside these rooms is not only the street. It is the fact that the money is finished. You never see that. You feel it whenever a door opens.

In Cinema 2, Deleuze describes the crystal-image, where a present and its own reflection cannot be pried apart, and his most productive version, found in Visconti, is the crystal in decomposition: a well-mannered world already rotting when the film arrives, so every ritual we watch is both the thing and its funeral. Stillman puts it in the furniture. The apartments are dressed to look inherited rather than purchased, worn upholstery and good pieces that are not new, money that arrived two generations ago and was never topped up. Charlie's coinage for the group, the "urban haute bourgeoisie," and his conviction that the class is doomed, is the crystal saying so out loud. Stillman's smartest move is to give that entirely correct diagnosis to a young man who is also a bit of a fool.

Grant the lens and the film reorganizes. Without it, this is a mild social comedy with a sad tint at the edges. With it, the parties stop being the setting and become the subject, because a ritual performed by people who know it is ending is not a backdrop. It is an image of time.

Which is why nothing here works the way movement usually works in movies. Deleuze split cinema in two. In the movement-image, a character perceives a situation and acts, and the act changes the situation; that circuit drives almost all narrative film. The time-image begins where it snaps, where someone sees perfectly well what is happening and has nothing available to do about it. Metropolitan is a comedy built from the snap. No antagonist worth the name, since Rick Von Sloneker stays a rumored threat kept at arm's length. No deadline. The two events that look like actions refuse to be actions: the rescue mission to Long Island turns out not to require rescuing, and the duel is not quite a duel, subsiding into embarrassment.

Deleuze catalogued the symptoms of this crisis and Stillman has most of them. A dispersive ensemble held together by proximity and a season rather than a purpose. The balade, the trip that transforms nothing. A consciousness of clichés, characters living among ready-made phrases and knowing it. Tom criticizes a novel he has not read; Audrey defends it. They understand themselves through literature and therefore misunderstand themselves in specifically literary ways.

With action off the table, duration carries the film. Christopher Tellefsen cuts late. Exchanges are held in one frame containing both speakers, so the comedy arrives in a raised eyebrow or a decision not to answer, unhighlighted. That patience has a name, temps mort, the dead time a film holds while nothing advances, and it has a pedigree. Bazin argued that carving a scene into shots hands the viewer a meaning already chosen; leave it whole and the viewer must decide where to look. Rohmer built a career on that, and Stillman took the method entire: unbroken medium two-shot, locked-off camera, one character revising a moral position under verbal pressure. Tom's Fourierism debate is Jean-Louis's Pascal wager from My Night at Maud's, moved to a Park Avenue sitting room. Claire's Knee supplied the seasonal bracket that opens, runs and closes before the group scatters, plus Almendros's practice of lighting interiors with the practicals, which Thomas reproduces on 16mm using lamps already in the apartments.

Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, calls a posture that exposes a social relation a gest. The finest one here is the bridge table: partnerships, bidding, concealed information, four-sided and closed. The table is a working diagram of who is allied with whom and who is being kept in the dark, and it states in seating and posture what the dialogue is too polite to say. The drawing-room semicircle does the same job, a convention lifted from The Philadelphia Story, where the arrangement of six people around furniture is the hierarchy. So does the raincoat.

So does Audrey's stillness. Deleuze's word for the character who can only look is the seer, and Carolyn Farina's reserve is the film's emotional center because she has the clearest view of what is being done to her and no move available under the rules she keeps. The sound works the same way. This is a cinema of pure verbal situations, where the utterances that would be actions in a drama, the declaration, the accusation, the challenge, never discharge. That failure is the joke. It is also the ache.

The inheritance runs deeper than Rohmer. The Magnificent Ambersons supplies the method of staging a class's extinction through its rituals rather than its finances, successive parties and elliptical cuts across weeks in a valedictory register that Stillman's doomed-UHB speech and abrupt Long Island ending both inherit. Holiday supplies the after-party's spatial figure: the grand house whose real life happens in a secondary room where the young retreat from the ballroom, the outsider admitted on sufferance and audited by the family's money. Tom is Johnny Case with less nerve and a worse coat. Manhattan supplies the dialogue-forward mix, talk balanced as the primary sonic event and scored with chamber writing rather than orchestral underlining. Mark Suozzo takes the debutante season seriously enough to write elegantly for it, which is the film's attitude toward its characters entire.

Forward, Noah Baumbach's Kicking and Screaming is the direct descendant, sharing Chris Eigeman and most of the tonal DNA; Wes Anderson's early films take mannered speech and formally arranged bourgeoisie somewhere visually opposite. The wider bequest was permission. A self-financed 16mm feature, cast with unknowns, made of people talking in rooms, went from Sundance to art houses to an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay, and Criterion kept it in print while its director went quiet.

Stillman's invention was to find that the collapse of action is funny. The European time-image comes with ruins and unbearable knowledge attached; he located the same structure inside a comedy of manners, where nobody can act because everybody was raised not to, and he located it in the one class American independent cinema of 1990 would not look at without contempt.

The film never decides whether the manners are a cage or a kindness, and that refusal is why it hasn't aged. Watch it again for what happens after the good lines. The reaction Stillman declines to cut away from, the person left in the frame holding still, is where the film keeps its real business.