‘There’s something really sexy about Scrooge McDuck...’
The ’90s were the golden age of films that mainly consisted of attractive, cool twenty-somethings talking. Talking in the street. Talking in nightclubs. Pop culture references. Sexual politics. The kind of dialogue espoused by Kevin Smith, Quentin Tarantino and Richard Linklater. In Hollywood terms, talk is cheap, and the studios realised that for a brief moment, there was an audience for dialogue-heavy movies with something to say. The Last Days of Disco is one such film and it’s mostly excellent…
The story is ostensibly about Alice (Chloe Sevigny) and Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale) – two book editors fresh out of college attempting to find love in their local disco. But the story is also about Dan (Matt Ross) and his commitment to his job, and about Des (Chris Eigeman) and his commitment to bedding various women by pretending to be gay and also about Jimmy (Mackenzie Astin) and his commitment to trying to sneak into the club. In short, this is a film about clubbing at the tail end of the disco era and also about how the ’90s were a golden age in which people could spend time worrying about getting into nightclubs without a feeling of impending doom hanging nefariously in the air at all times. Halcyon days.
One of the main achievements of The Last Days of Disco is alerting me to the fact that I actually do enjoy loads of disco music (most of it involving Nile Rodgers) despite the fact that I came into this movie believing all disco music to be cack. So, yeah. The soundtrack is excellent. I also thoroughly enjoyed the performance of Eigeman (who has all the best lines) and Sevigny – the latter of whom it is always a delight to see in a starring role rather than a supporting one. Her uneasy relationship with Beckinsale’s bitchy Charlotte is a joy to behold and hints that there could have been an alternative career for the English actress involving more indie dramedies and fewer vampires had she pursued more films like this one.
The Last Days of Disco is smart, cool and fun, and while the plot never really delivers in terms of stakes or tension, it is still a pleasure to spend 113 minutes in the company of these characters.
