[When I first saw it,] Metropolitan was like no other American film I had seen before for this reason alone: Its characters had a lot to say about class in general, and the condition of their class specifically. This sort of thing is not typical for Americans, who tend to think that there's only one class in their society, the middle, and therefore really no class (and the related tensions) at all. Metropolitan is not set during the late-1980s, when it was shot, but 20 years earlier, in the late-1960s. At that distant time, the idea of one massive class had not been fully established in the American imagination. And so Metropolitan is about the twilight of a world. The young men know very well that the end is near, that things are going to radically change, that their whole way of life will become extinct. Nick and his set of friends are the ghosts of Manhattan. They even wear top hats and tailcoats. "The 1968 protests had not hit this group yet," explained [director Whit] Stillman. "Then, all at once, everything went crazy: drugs, Woodstock, long hair." And that was the end of their party.

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