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Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup. Hello, my name's David Rundsman and this is past-present future, the History of Ideas

podcast. Today's episode is a recording of the conversation that I had with the author and

journalist James Marriott at the Regent Street Cinema in London.

In front of a live audience, we were discussing James' favourite film.

It is Whit Stillman's Metropolitan.

It's a film about being young and feeling old.

It's a film about money and class, about love and hate,

but it's also a film about books and a great film of ideas.

As always with these episodes recorded at the Regent Street Cinema, we are very conscious that the audience have just seen the film that we're discussing,

but people listening will not just have seen the film that we're discussing,

and in fact many people will never have seen the film at all.

So I want to say just a little bit about Whit Stillman's Metropolitan,

just a bit about what's in it, the story, and some of the themes so that you know what

James and I are discussing. It was released in 1990. It's ostensibly set around then, I guess,

in the late 80s, but as you'll hear, it's not completely clear that that is when it's set.

There's something vague about the historical timing of this film.

It feels earlier. It feels maybe more like the 70s, maybe even earlier than that.

...