Metropolitan Film Review: The Imperfectly Perfect Film

Metropolitan Film Review

Director: Whit Stillman.
Cast: Christopher Eigeman, Edward Clements and Carolyn Farina.

Here is Yellow Magpie’s Metropolitan film review.

20 years ago, a small, low-budget film barely made a splash in the endlessly moving ocean of cinematic releases. Although critically praised by those fortunate enough to view it at the time, Metropolitan has continued to remain at an odiously low level of obscurity.

Those who did manage to get lucky and view it witnessed a rare treat, a film with soul and single-minded uniqueness. Metropolitan is Whit Stillman’s creation. It is redolent of everyplace, yet it belongs to no where.

Delightfully refreshing and singularly unique, the film follows a group of young, self-involved, bourgeois New Yorkers as they struggle to span the gap between adolescence and adulthood.

‘these same people are also much more interesting than they imagine but certainly not in the way they expect.‘

Some people are always less interesting than they assume themselves to be. Yet, paradoxically and rather disagreeable to the previous sentence, these same people are interesting  in a way that they would never suspect. For instance, people with dangerously high esteem and high self-regard, despite being selfish and irritating, can be highly fascinating to watch. Metropolitan is punctuated by such characters.

The film blends together people who are genuinely interesting, of which the characters of Nick, Tom and Audrey certainly fit the bill and people who are less interesting on their own merits, such as the vacuous Serena and egomaniacal Rick, but are nonetheless fascinating also.

The unreserved triumph of Metropolitan is that it fuses everything together with such care and precision. It covers all the bases by saying as much as possible without ever resorting to blunting the audience with a sledgehammer of obvious verbiage.

Adding to Whitman’s dexterity and his lightness of touch, is the fact that Metropolitan never once seems stiff or rigid. It always feels like one has intruded upon a very odd group of insular people, a group of people who are both accessible and decidedly distant at once.

‘He becomes our vicarious compatriot, a reluctant hero.’

Tom Townsend, portrayed by Edward Clements, is the key to the film and a fine example of a modern-day hero. He is our entry into this strange and singular world with its complex customs and social hierarchy. With Tom present, the audience immediately has somebody to empathise with.

He becomes our vicarious compatriot, a reluctant hero. Townsend is deemed a hero not by his heroic deeds but by humanly trying to be a better person.

Although Audrey Rouget, wonderfully played by Carolyn Farina, appears to be a one-dimensional, naive girl she is upon close inspection revealed to be much more subtle than a lazy assessment suggests. She is a true-to-life mix of naivety and shrewdness as you will see when you watch it.

Christopher Eigeman’s Nick is the driving force and star of the film. His wonderfully eccentric and knowing personality is foiled by fatalism, a perspective that runs deep into his personality. Nick’s cutting humour, apart from being highly entertaining, also has a knack for getting right to the heart of any matter. Eigeman imbues the tortured traits of his character in an almost flawless performance.

Metropolitan is also a film which manages to do a rare thing. It manages the almost impossible task of both sending up its character’s milieu without ever once resorting to the cheap tactics of parodying them.

‘At the heart of any self-obsession rests insecurity.‘

Perhaps Metropolitan’s most riveting feature is its authenticity. One cannot help but question if the world that the film has created is true or not. Fabrication or reality? In the end, we will never know for certain as we can never experience enough social scenes or people to form an empirical exactness. But that doesn’t prevent us from having fun guessing.

At the heart of any self-obsession rests insecurity. Essentially, what the viewer sees is the characters’ naked doubts. Insecurities that will be better disguised in later years as these people age and are more culturally conditioned to conceal their fears and anxieties.

One of Stillman’s great talents is his ability to find alternative viewpoints to both existential questions of ‘important’ merit and the much more genuinely odd and interesting ones of the everyday. Metropolitan’s wonderful strength, and conversely perhaps its greatest weakness, is its idiosyncrasy. People will either love or hate its dialogue-heavy plot. If you are part of the former undoubtedly you will cherish this.

Highly Recommended

You can obtain Metropolitan here from Amazon.

Amazon.co.uk
For people living in Ireland or the United Kingdom you can access Metropolitan here.

Amazon.ca
For those living in Canada you can obtain Metropolitan from here.

Amazon.de
For Germany: Metropolitan.

Amazon.fr
For France: Metropolitan.