“Cosmopolitans”: Young Americans In Paris
The third wave of Amazon‘s partly crowdsourced pilot development slate kicked off on Thursday with five new options for people who are also looking for vacuums and watches. One of the three, which is part of the trailer above, is “The Cosmopolitans.” Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan,” “Barcelona,” “The Last Days Of Disco“) has a penchant for the esoteric and the studied, and this new one doesn’t disappoint along those lines. It’s as dryly first world in its problems and scenarios as Stillman’s previous efforts, focusing this time on group of young American expatriates trying to find themselves in Paris. (The Cosmo trailer starts at around the 1:58 mark in the clip above.) The series stars Adam Brody, Carrie MacLemore, Chloe Sevigny, Dree Hemingway, Freddy Asblom, Jordan Roundtree and Adriano Giannini and like any good Stillman effort, it’s beautifully shot (he wrote, directed and produced), and the dialogue is mannered and replete with staccato observations that in turn produce similarly idiosyncratic replies. It’s a shock that Stillman didn’t use Vampire Weekend as a house band.
There’s not much plot to tell: Strangers meet strangers and go to parties and chat, with a little forward movement that hints the gang will be together for more adventures of an ill-defined but stylized nature. The pilot is less ambiguous than ethereal, but if you’re a Stillman aficionado then you’re probably all in. Other Amazon voters will be the intriguing X factor.
