I love the film so was eager to see what Whit Stillman came up with for his novelisation. Stillman’s movies are talky so his screenplays make marvelous reading – Metropolitan and Barcelona were both published (the scripts) but not Disco which presumably won’t be because of this book.
It's written from the POV of Jimmy Steinway, which offers some useful insights but sometimes feels odd because he wasn’t really the main character of the film (he says interviews were done with the participants, which doesn’t seem right – maybe a couple of different POV accounts would have worked better).
A lot of the time Stillman seems content to reproduce the script – watching the movie it sometimes felt continuity was odd - eg at the end “that’s why you took my passport” – this faults are not fixed up for the novel, which is frustrating. Some bits are added – a scene where the gang go to a festival, discussion of a Labor Day party that is referred to in the film, a bit of an epilogue to explain what happened to the characters in the subsequent 20 years.
Most of it is just fleshed out screenplay, but since most of that was wonderful in the first place it doesn’t really matter. I wonder if this and the other two films are the only stories that Stillman has to tell. I hope not.
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