大市民

“我们的词汇那么贫乏了吗？ 需要法语才能表达我们的观点？” 引用电影中的台词，之所以用法语，是因为法语的使用绕不开阶层和品味。

大市民的品味是bourgeois，gossip girls是nouveau riche。谁能料到同样的描写曼哈顿的preppy，十几年变化那么大了。大市民一直讨论阶层的落寞，一定程度上是的，正如这些孩子说的，向下移动很容易，想想gossip girls表现的阶层，靠时装（主要是品牌）和炫耀性消费，的确阶层向下移动了。

整部电影主要是对话和简单的场景交替，是不是和简奥斯丁小说很一致。女主Audrey也有着奥斯丁小说人物般的个性和价值。Bourgeois的品味，比如爱好文学性的讨论和对哲学的思考，以架起一个haute bourgeoisie，的确在现在慢慢被取代，随着美国中产的萎缩，这个阶层也在被稀释。如果这个电影在30年后的今天拍，似乎没人能相信了，gossip girls需要的是快速的性爱和金钱带来的满足，但是一个人你和他聊哲学，文学然后发现你慢慢爱上他，会被说成是知识分子的意淫。所以我还是很偏爱这部电影，借用电影的话，“奥斯丁的价值在现在会被嬉笑。” “奥斯丁那时候也会嘲笑我们现在的价值呢。”

想想大学时光匆匆过了，是否还有人和你思考社会，哲学吗？

Make-believe posing and posturing is part and parcel of acting, professionals need years of practice to excel in it, for amateurs who tread the boards for the very first time (METROPOLITAN is a case in point), the result can be a toss-up and to a great extent contingent on its director’s aptitude to key their personal traits into the roles they are assigned to play, in that regard, Whit Stillman makes an exemplar specimen with his very first feature film, a less neurotic, more self-possessed leisure-class confab-fest a là Woody Allen.

Set in the present day of Manhattan’s debutante season circa Christmas time, a secluded group of Upper East State preppies, the so-called “Sally Fowler Rat Pack”, welcomes an initiate named Tom Townsend (Clements), a Princeton student who is a rung lower than the rest, among which Audrey Rouget (Farina) has been secretly carrying a torch for him, but Tom still hasn’t got over his popular ex-girlfriend Serena (Thompson), who is not included in the group though, and prioritizes the latter over Audrey during one outing, which causes some dissension among the rat pack, that aside, Tom is gradually eased into the group by a cynical Nick Smith (Eigeman), whose snarky remarks about a young titled baron Rick Von Sloneker (Kempe), do not strike the right chord with other members of the group, particularly Cynthia (Gillies), and he starts to lose his credit after fabulating a harrowing story to authenticate Rick’s womanizing vice. After giving some introspection of his own actions, and parsing his true feelings for Audrey, a guileless Tom dreads that he has obliquely driven her into the arms of Rick, as a last resort, accompanied by the philosophy-obsessed Charlie Black (Nichols), he drops by Rick’s beach house to rescue Audrey, only to find out that Audrey isn’t a clueless damsel-in-distress, thankfully, his heroic gesture seems to work in his favor at any rate.

Enfolded in a beguilingly vintage, subdued golden hue and jazz-infused incidental music, METROPOLITAN ages resplendently well with its sophisticated candor and stimulating burrowing into the mentation of a certain cross-section, which doesn’t necessarily pall into neither undue self-aggrandizement, self-absorption, nor self-lamentation (either ways has killed the mumblecore fad by now), each and every character is sedulously designed with a rounded representation like a real-life person with both charms and defects (although their ratio varies drastically from individual to individual), Audrey’s bashful nature cannot blot out a bracing mixed whiff of self-sufficiency and fragile sensibility (rubbed off from Jane Austen’s novels for sure), Tom has a boyish innocuousness that is very congenial, but his own wet-behind-the-ear, insular cognition of the vast world is troublesome for his age, and indeed, they do make a compatible and complementary couple.

Nichols flogs Charlie’s pedantic verbiage to death with both barrels, but also betrays his pedantic geekiness with an aroma of benign openness, but it is Eigeman, who stands out among the entire ensemble with a telegenic patina that is few and far between for a tenderfoot, who is able to telegraph that unpretentious feeling of being brutally honest, yet synchronically struts his character’s off-putting self-righteousness, a fascinating performance which leaves Nick sorely missed after his symbolic departure at the train station in the wee hours, therein the proto-bromance between Nick and Tom is acutely pointed and artfully downplayed at once by Stillman, who magnificently breaks his duck with an authorial signature, notwithstanding it is predominantly seen through an unbalanced lens of a boy’s club.

referential entries: Stillman’s THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO (1996, 7.0/10); LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP (2016, 7.2/10).

版权归作者所有，任何形式转载请联系作者。 作者：FrozenElsa（来自豆瓣） 来源：//www.douban.com/doubanapp/dispatch?uri=/note/603893378/ 因为之前不认识她，看完之后真的被迷的不要不要的，所以查了好多资料。但是得到的结果都是心碎💔 她演这片前是在梅西百货做销售员，可惜的是演完之后依然是销售员。。 当时评论界给的很高的评价，不管是给这片，还是给她，甚至有新奥黛丽赫本的评价。但是好莱坞好像不是很钟意她，在这部之后又演了三部片后就息影了，其中包括马丁斯科塞斯的纯真年代，当然，是个小角色，以及依然是斯蒂尔曼的最后的迪斯科（我真的没看到她。。。） 看了大市民25周年的那个采访，料挺足，2015年的，看到她和导演都老了不少，反正我是认不出她现在的样子了，她有说到为什么拍完这部片后就没有什么片约。原因有点。。奇怪，不懂是玩笑还是真的。。她说因为她不是金发，所以没什么片约。。应该是玩笑吧。。不过我愿意相信这个是真的。。 果然征服了评论界，还是依然容易在好莱坞翻船的啊。。真是太可惜了