Whit Stillman films tend to arrive on their own clock. Since “Metropolitan” introduced him as American cinema’s great comic anatomist of privileged manners, his career has moved with unusual patience: “Barcelona,” “The Last Days of Disco,” “Damsels in Distress,” and, most recently, 2016’s “Love & Friendship.” Now, a decade later, Stillman is heading back behind the camera with “A Night at Claridge’s,” a wartime drama starring Adam Brody and Laura Carmichael.
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The film is adapted from Patrick Hamilton’s 1947 novel “The Slaves of Solitude,” and shifts Stillman’s usual interest in social combat into southern England in the fall of 1943. Carmichael stars as Miss Roach, a publisher’s reader displaced after being bombed out of London, who takes refuge in a boarding house during the lead-up to D-Day. There, she finds herself caught among Vicki, a vivacious German woman, the bullying Mr. Thwaites, and Brody’s Dayton Pike, an American lieutenant whose arrival intensifies the boarding house’s already volatile dynamic.
That premise sounds like fertile ground for Stillman, whose films have often turned drawing rooms, nightclubs, college campuses, and country estates into miniature battlefields of class, language, self-delusion, and desire. The difference here, however, is scale and pressure. “A Night at Claridge’s” is not simply another comedy of manners. Still, a story set against wartime displacement, psychological tension, and the social discomfort of people trapped together with nowhere better to go.
Tom Bennett, who worked with Stillman on “Love & Friendship,” and Susan Hampshire also co-star. Altitude is introducing the project to buyers at Cannes this month, putting the film in front of international distributors as the market gets underway.
Stillman’s return is notable because his filmography has never felt overextended. “Metropolitan” remains one of the great American debuts of the 1990s; “Barcelona” and “The Last Days of Disco” deepened his interest in young people turning performative social lives into a survival strategy; “Damsels in Distress” found him in campus mode with Greta Gerwig; and “Love & Friendship” proved how naturally his comic sensibility fit Jane Austen’s world. That last film, starring Kate Beckinsale and Chloë Sevigny, was a reminder that Stillman’s dialogue can feel both antique and modern, as if social humiliation has barely changed its wardrobe.
Brody’s casting also makes this a sort of reunion. The actor previously appeared in Stillman’s “Damsels in Distress” and the filmmaker’s Amazon pilot “The Cosmopolitans,” making him a natural fit for Stillman’s particular rhythms: verbal precision, awkward charm, romantic misdirection, and men who often understand less about themselves than they think. Carmichael, best known for “Downton Abbey,” gives the film a lead whose period-drama credentials are obvious. However, Stillman’s world usually asks performers to play decorum and panic at the same time.
No release date has been announced yet, but with Altitude bringing the film to Cannes buyers, Stillman’s long-awaited return finally appears to be moving.
