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I loved it. Once again, I left the film deeply disappointed that these people do not exist in real life. Whit Stillman’s characters are insane, and wonderfully so. It’s surprising to find yourself falling in love with total snobs with delusions of grandeur as you watch them tap-dance around pseudologia fantastica (pathological lying, but how much more awesome is that term?). But in every movie, you do. At least, I do. Because they’re also nostalgic and funny and have original thoughts—an astonishingly rare thing to have.

I’m not talking about run-of-the-mill, carefully-engineered quirk like playing a ukulele (I’m looking’ at you, Zooey Deschanel). Puh. When there’s a thought process behind “originality,” as in, “How awesome and edgy would it be if I started collecting typewriters and vinyl?!”, don’t you kind of miss the point of individuality? Quirk, much like truthiness, should come from your gut; not from what the street vendors in Williamsburg tell you is cool.

And so it does in Stillman movies. Just like you kind of had to love Nick Smith in Metropolitan for his devotion to UHBs, you have to love Violet (Greta Gerwig) for her resolve to help the depressed through tap-dancing and the olfactory benefits of complementary motel soap, and Charlie (Adam Brody) for his sadness at the decline of decadence (“Take homosexuality—it used to have some real elegance. Now it’s just muscle men and Kathy Griffin. I’m not gay, but in another era it might have held some appeal”). These ideas are bizarre and probably pretty offensive. But the characters so thoroughly believe in them that you can’t not admire them for it.