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.

metropolitan