A brilliant analysis of the films of Whit Stillman (my favourite filmmaker) by my friend Julia Magnet.

It's far too good a piece to precis - anyone who has seen Metropolitan, Barcelona or The Last Days of Disco (and if you haven't, rush to your video store and get all three, NOW! - you'll thank me) will be gripped by it - but the kernel of her argument is this:

What Stillman notices in Barcelona is that irresponsible politics and irresponsible sexual behavior spring from the same ideology. The moral relativism that informs post–sexual revolution mores also undergirds European anti-Americanism. To a relativist, there is no difference between Soviet Russia and NATO; the Americans are no better than the fascists—what they all really want is power, which, like judgment, is one of the only postmodern vices.

As she concludes:

Although Hollywood, post-9/11, is now edging toward patriotism, it is still at the simplistic level of the action film—usually a war film set in the past. Stillman stands for the America we want to see—of traditional mores, aesthetic sophistication, wry patriotism and wit—and does so with a style and intelligence that put to shame European babble about America’s “total lack of culture.”