August 26, 2025 - Ian Thomas Malone

There is a period of time in many young people’s lives where they grapple with the mechanics of the society around them, often interjecting the material they studied in school into their idealistic view of how society should work. Much of it is nonsense. The exercise often grows old around the same time you realize that the kids at the kegger don’t care about some long-dead French socialist.

Whit Stillman’s 1990 debut film Metropolitan centers its narrative around an odious, mostly harmless group of college students bored on winter break. Tom Townsend (Edward Clements) is a middle-class outsider making his way through Princeton. Tom hates high society, particularly debutante balls, but attends one anyway. A chance encounter lumps Tom in with a social group known as the Sally Fowler Rat Pack, who mostly attend balls and spend all night talking about philosophy and other idle musings.

Tom begins to shed his anti-bourgeoisie feelings as a result of the newfound attention bestowed on him by members of the SFRP, who largely adopt him into their group out of boredom, and a shortage of male escorts for the ball. Tom looks up to Nick Smith (Christopher Eigeman), one of the more outspoken and opinionated members of the group, who paints a bleak outlook for their generation. One girl in the group, Audrey (Carolyn Farina) grows attracted to Tom, who’s still hung up on his ex, Serena (Ellia Thompson), a friend of many of the women in the SFRP. Tom’s introduction into the group is met with suspicion by a few, namely Jane (Allison Parisi), who is extra defensive of Audrey.

Produced with a budget of just over $200,000, Stillman largely relies on his script and his actors to propel the narrative. Most of the scenes take place in apartments or on the peripherals of debutante balls. Eigeman and Parisi propel much of the story, both possessing large personalities capable of finding ample nuance in largely repetitive scenes. Clements, who never acted again aside from a small role in Star Trek IV: The Undiscovered County, fully embodies the awkward, aloof Tom, a young man who struggles to get enough of the very thing he claimed to hate.

The work of Jane Austen supplies a steady backdrop for Tom and the rest of the characters. Audrey is a huge Austen fan. Tom dumps on Austen’s work without having read it himself, instead relying on literary criticism to supply him with the opinions he thinks he’s supposed to have, without any sense of irony.

Stillman finds plenty of subtleties that elevate Metropolitan above a standard comedy of manners, able to engage earnestly with the concerns of youth without ever bending to the self-importance of his characters. The members of the SFRP are all experiencing their first small taste of freedom. That kind of liberation can go to one’s head rather easily. Stillman doesn’t fall for the superficialities of youth, instead opting for a more subtle approach that manages to supply some meaning for all the time spent discussing philosophy in the middle of the night.

The characters in Metropolitan often feel like a stretch of winter break is the most important part of their lives. Stillman handles them with grace without expecting his audience to buy into their nonsense. Metropolitan is not exactly life-changing cinema, but there’s a lot of heart in Stillman’s examination of the junior members of the bourgeoisie.

‘Last Summer’ review: a haunting treatise on lust

Written by Ian Thomas Malone, Posted in Blog, Movie Reviews, Pop Culture

One of film’s disquieting pleasures is the way the medium offers its viewers the chance to experience a life that they themselves would never lead. The thought of an adult woman sleeping with her stepchild is wrong on so many levels. As director Catherine Breillat demonstrates in her 2023 film Last Summer (original French title: L’Été dernier), subjects that repulse on a visceral level can still elicit feelings from unexpected places.

Anne (Léa Drucker) is an attorney who works with at-risk children. Anne lives in a quiet town outside Paris with her husband Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin) and two adopted children. A self-proclaimed “gerontophile” (attracted to older people), Anne seems to enjoy her comfortable life, even with a little obvious distance from her husband, until Paul’s troubled seventeen-year-old son Théo (Samuel Kircher) comes to live with them.

Théo is the polar opposite of Paul, anti-social, mischievous, and charming. Théo bonds with the children while getting on Anne’s nerves, especially with Paul’s frequent work-related absences. Théo’s magic eventually takes hold, leading the adult woman to make the very bad and irresponsible choice to sleep with her stepson.

Based off the 2019 Danish film Queen of Hearts, Breillat revels in the uncomfortable. Last Summer has numerous spicy scenes, played with an energy that orbits the realm of passion without ever really touching the surface. Something is clearly missing from Anne’s idyllic country life. Drucker plays Anne with such precision, a woman intoxicated by the thrill of the hunt without ever losing sight of the obvious destruction caused by her decisions.

Anyone can conjure up an image of the perfect life. Each of us might need to swap out some pieces to match the reality we can make for ourselves. Some of us don’t have much money, or the ability to have kids of our own. Sometimes the love we once shared with our spouse withers and dies. Breillat is fascinated not just with power dynamics, but with decay.

Kircher plays Théo with a perfect blend of charisma and tediousness. Théo’s boyish looks never compensate for the reality that he’s a clueless young kid. The justifications for Anne’s infatuation with him exist in her own head. Breillat never tries to defend her protagonist’s horrid behavior.

There is something weirdly alluring in watching the drama unfold. Théo’s penchant for drama precludes him from discretion. Anne’s excuses are hardly believable to anyone, except for those so caught up in the idea of the idyllic life that they’re willing to ignore the reality right there in front of them.

Drucker is agonizing. Anne is a truly tedious character, obsessed with the gaze that men, usually older, have bestowed upon her all her life. Stuck in a boring, quiet town, with nothing to amuse her beyond the children she adopted to fulfill that very purpose, she begins to fall apart, until the very second that the gaze returns. It’s ugly, but deeply human at the same time.

Life doesn’t always go the way we planned. You can’t control the actions of others, only the way that you choose to receive them. Breillat produces the film’s most compelling work when she homes in on that reality. Last Summer is an uncomfortable ride through its 104-minute, but there’s a lot of food for thought. You can piece together the model of an ideal existence fairly easily, but it takes much more effort to make it come alive.