Whit Stillman can write pop-culture deconstruction dialogue as well as Quentin Tarantino or Kevin Smith. He may keep it more highbrow and restrained, more theatre and less film, but that does not stop the words from sizzling off the screen. In fact, on closer inspection, the banter about Scrooge McDuck or in the case of this scene here, Disney’s Lady and the Tramp, says much about the actual characters and advances the plot and fills in the characters more than simply nice background dressing for the sake of tone or cool. Stillman only had three features, the loosely connected trilogy of Metropolitan (1990), Barcelona (1994) and this one, Last Days of Disco (1998), yet all three are pretty much note perfect in how they play. We might as well throw the auteur label around, because it is hard not to immediately pick up the writer-directors stamp from only seeing mere seconds of any of these films. Only in a Whit Stillman movie would a full on bacchanal dance party be going on (New York’s Club 54 at the peak of the Disco era, although it is never called that specifically) and yet have the main characters sitting around talking in high language about low culture. After all these were New England graduates along for the scene as much for cosmetics, simply to be there, as anything else. They are far to uptight to really participate in the mulch of art-gay-fashion culture, but would rather be seen being there (or the thrill of getting their friends in) while hashing out their various relationship issues and neurotic hang-ups amongst themselves.

Thus while sitting quietly off to the side of the meat market, young assistant D.A. (Matt Keeslar) lays the smackdown on Lady and the Tramp for teaching young women to worship jerks, the clubsfloor manager, Des (Chris Eigeman, a Stillman regular) goes on the defensive that Tramp was rehabilitated, eventually. This may not play out watching the scene out of context below (something which is still highly entertaining), but I assure you that it is very much in line with how each of those two characters, at the time vying for the attentions of the heroine of of the film, Alice (Chloë Sevigny), view themselves. Not only that, it goes a long way for being a primary piece of foreshadowing to how the plot (the real plot, not so much the money laundering plot or disco plot) involving Alice’s sex and love life, and how it is going to go. And for that it trumps a gangsters take on Madonna’s Like a Virgin or a register jockey’s digression on the deaths of thousands of innocent contractors on the Death Star. Open plea to Whit Stillman: It has been too long, please make another movie.