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Critics have praised the films of writer/director Whit Stillman for their exceptionally intelligent portrayal of the lives and loves of the "urban haute bourgeoisie." His three comedies of manners—"Metropolitan," "Barcelona," and "The Last Days of Disco"—sparkle with urbane and ironic wit. In Doomed Bourgeois in Love, the traditionalist social critic Mark C. Henrie brings together a collection of political theorists, literary critics, and classicists to explore the meaning of Stillman's films. These essays contend that Stillman's art is an effort to "ironize" our ironic age; as such, they constitute a major achievement of Christian humanism in our time.
What They're Saying...
"[Stillman is] one of the wittiest filmmakers of his generation, or any other. And now he is the subject of a book of essays, a few of which are high-minded enough to make a doctoral candidate blush. The contributors...have a great many shrewd and illuminating things to say about Stillman and his art; and if they sometimes lapse into overseriousness, it is the vice of a virtue, which is that they take him very seriously indeed. [Stillman] is the poet of their touching plight, and Doomed Bourgeois in Love pays due tribute to the singular subtlety with which he has given it voice."
— National Review
"Like C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Dorothy Sayers, Whit Stillman advances an aesthetic vision that cannot help but appeal to a certain repressed yearning in all but the most Laodicean viewer."
— First Things
Other Contributors...
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