![]() “What if it’s pretty bad? Would it be better in that case not to be true to thine own self?” “What if thine own self is not so good?” asks a disillusioned former nightclub employee. Near the end of his sharpest and sweetest film, The Last Days of Disco, there is a brief debate about Polonius’s advice (“To thine own self be true”) in Hamlet. Stillman’s characters are plagued, as those in Austen are, by matters of etiquette, class, honour and integrity. Now it is the grunge rockers who resemble museum exhibits, while the young fogeys of Metropolitan look timeless. Cameron Crowe’s comedy Singles, set in the Seattle music scene that produced Nirvana and Pearl Jam, felt modern when it was released in 1992. His films age well because they aren’t beholden to fads or trends. ![]() If that isn’t the case with Love & Friendship, Whit Stillman’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s epistolary novella Lady Susan, that is only because this director’s characters have always conversed as though they were in an arch 19th-century comedy of manners, irrespective of whether the setting was, say, upper-class 1980s Manhattan during the debutante ball season (his 1990 debut, Metropolitan) or a modern college campus ( Damsels in Distress). When a director associated with the modern world enters the realm of period drama, there can be an electrifying jolt – think of Martin Scorsese and The Age of Innocence, Mike Leigh and Topsy-Turvy, or Andrea Arnold and Wuthering Heights. ![]()
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