Metropolitan: When Austen Met Allen

Jane Austen and Woody Allen seem like an unlikely duo to be fused together in a cinematic rendering. However, Whit Stillman's 1990 film Metropolitan is no ordinary film. Taking the comedy-of-manners style and themes of class from Jane Austen novels, Metropolitan sets out to depict a specific group of people that no anticipated would ever get a movie about them made: The young urban debutantes in late 20th century New York. The film opens with the title card "Not so long ago," which immediately showcases the influence Austen had on Stillman. Austen novels are often commentaries on the desire for class among the young and the greedy, who lament that things are not how they once were. The key difference here being that the protagonists of Austen novels were often female, whereas the protagonist of Stillman's film is a Tom Townsend, a male Princeton student.

Stillman claims that much of the film is pulled from his own youth when he met up with high society university students while on Christmas break from Harvard University. This is where Woody Allen's influence on the film becomes apparent. Opting for a low-key, meandering style of cinematography to fit the pace that the story moves (much like a 70s'-80s' Allen film), Stillman lets the characters, acting, and dialogue speak for themselves with as little technical distraction as possible. Because Tom is, in many respects, Stillman's surrogate in Metropolitan, one would think he may lionize the character as a result of vanity. Again, this is where Stillman wisely takes a cue from Allen and goes the route of self-deprecation, albeit in a far more subdued way that fits his film perfectly. Tom claims to be different from the rest of the debutantes, but as the film progresses, the lines between Tom and the rest of the group become more and more blurred as Tom seems more and more hypocritical of their behavior. By combining the personal nature of the story as a result of his own experiences a la Woody Allen with the biting commentary of Austen on high society life, Whit Stillman makes Metropolitan into the rare film that stands out for both its uniqueness, but also its truth.