Last days of disco

Whatever happened to Kate Beckinsale? The simplest answer is that she met and married (in 2004) Len Wiseman, an American arts department props assistant who wrote and directed the vampired melodrama Underworld (2003), in which she starred.

That profitable franchise is her main claim to fame and fortunes. They'd seemed unlikely goals after her 2001 starring role, alongside Ben Affleck, in Michael Bay's lambasted Pearl Harbor. She found her niche though, following Underworld with a similar horror fantasy, Van Helsing. Back in 1998, though, the former Oxford University student's Hollywood future looked bright after she gained a lead role in The Last Days of Disco, a satirical review of the disco era's Studio 54 heydays.

It was the third movie in a semi-autobiographical trilogy by Harvard graduate writer-director Whit Stillman, following Metropolitan (1990; Oscar-nominated screenplay) and Barcelona (1994). Fin de siecle comedies of manners about the "upper haute bourgeoisie", they told tales of WASP Harvard sons and Hampshire daughters experiencing life at the rich end, courtesy of parental grants and posh college degrees.

The Disco episode focuses on two young women working as a book publisher's readers, seeking success (associate editorship, to start) and suitable love (or acceptable sex) in New York in the early 80s, when gaining entry to fashionable disco-dancing nightclubs was the social be-all and end-all. Beckinsale plays the viciously bitchy, and socially needy, aggressive brunette, an unlikely room-mate for a more intellectual novice man-chasing blond (Chloe Sevigny).

Despite a shared behavioural trait of being unpleasantly honest (ie gauche and rude) about other people's foibles and inadequacies, the pair of brittle quasi-feminists meet, romance, swap and lose Harvard graduates of varying intelligence and desirability, including a disco assistant manager who dispenses with unwanted girlfriends by claiming sudden self-awareness of latent homosexuality. There's also an assistant district attorney with a history of mental problems, a publishing workmate with attitude problems, a third beautiful room-mate, bouncers and a nightclub operator with attitude problems, and an advertising agency man whose middle-aged clients want to go night-clubbing.

Stillman probably derived his acerbic dialogue from observation at Studio 54 and similar '80s social institutions (where Beckinsale's character enthuses about social grouping well before Facebook was a sexual glimmer in a later generation of Harvard men's minds). This was the era of Yuppies.

Their disco scene seems too well-dressed, body languages too well-groomed, the dance music too decorous, compared to the West Coast's disco scene of harder drugs and profuse sweat. The disco world of NY Yuppies showcased self-centred social poise, with a restrained volume of the music enabling conversation and snidery, enunciated with a self-conscious preciousness that looks and sounds silly and dated in Stillman's dialogue (cringefully in an attempt to deconstruct the Lady and the Tramp socio-economically).

*****

After a 13-year hiatus, Stillman has a fourth feature in post-production. Beckinsale is at work on another Underworld, while her husband's directing her in an adaptation of a Philip Dick short story (starring Colin Farrell).