I am currently watching a 1983 BBC adaptation of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, and I feel Whit Stillman’s presence at my elbow. The American filmmaker’s oeuvre is scant: few films, released with long intervals in between, and all steeped in Austenian wit and morality.

Stillman’s first film, Metropolitan (1990), follows a small group of Park Avenue debutantes and their escorts, who regularly congregate at afterparties, and who welcome into their fold a socialist outsider who acts as a revealing disrupter. Stillman’s most recent film Love and Friendship (2016) is an adaptation of Austen’s early epistolary novel Lady Susan. The release of Love and Friendship cast a retrospective light over Stillman’s previous works, making explicit the filmmaker’s debt to Austen. From Metropolitan onwards, in Barcelona (1994), The Last Days of Disco (1998) and Damsels in Distress (2011), Stillman, transposing Austen’s preoccupations into his American upper-class comedies of manners, uses, as Austen wrote of her own writing process, ‘a fine brush on a little bit (not two inches wide) of ivory’.

Metropolitan is, unusually in the context of contemporary cinema – though not in that of Stillman’s films – a comedy about character and morality. It is also unusual in being set among a tiny sliver of New York society: the self-styled preppie ‘Sally Fowler Rat Pack’, which includes bookish ingenue Audrey (Carolyn Farina), snobbish arbiter of taste Nick (Chris Eigeman), the thoughtful and diffident Charlie (Taylor Nichols) and glamorous Sally (Dylan Huntley), the hostess of post-dance gatherings at her parents’ sumptuous apartment. For context, the film, whose subtitle is ‘Doomed, Bourgeois, In Love’, was released in the same year as Goodfellas and The Godfather Part III. Made on a shoestring budget (a reported $230,000) over the course of 30 days, this provocative outlier was a surprise hit and earned its author an Oscar nomination for best original script.

Thirty-five years after its release, Metropolitan has dated very little. This is, in part, thanks to its out-of-time quality. The action is set, an opening intertitle tells us, in ‘Manhattan, Christmas vacation, not so long ago’. But when was ‘not so long ago’? Five years, ten years, 20 years previously? Fashion is an indicator, as in all period drama, and the evening dresses worn by the girls in the first afterparty scene – strapless taffeta with puffy skirts and bows – will immediately bring back the 1980s for those old enough to remember them. But the action of the film is also informed by Stillman’s memories of the debutante seasons of his own youth – he graduated from Harvard in 1973.

Added to this are moments of nostalgic time-slippage, such as when Audrey explains that the romance of Manhattan at night reminds her of War and Peace, or when Nick advocates for the wearing of detachable collars, less convenient but better. Letters – exchanged by the characters while they were at boarding school – are at the heart of the film’s intrigue. There are discussions about the propriety or impropriety of keeping the letters you receive from friends, and of reading private correspondence aloud to others for entertainment. ‘I remember a long letter you wrote to Serena about agrarian socialism,’ Audrey says to a crestfallen Tom (Edward Clements), who believed his love letters to Serena (Elizabeth Thompson) to have been for her eyes only. At this point we also realise that Tom (a self-declared follower of the utopian Charles Fourier) is only a relative outsider: his parents’ divorce has made him a déclassé preppie, now exiled to the Upper West Side of Central Park, traditionally considered more intellectual and less patrician than the Upper East Side, and in Metropolitan still only on the cusp of gentrification. Such shades of social nuance recall another novelist: Edith Wharton and her anthropology of New York, Old and New, in The Age of Innocence.

‘I love anachronism’, Stillman said, ‘and this was the chance to film, essentially, a costume picture set in the present day or recent past.’ The recent past of Metropolitan is being revisited by an older and wiser observer – Stillman was 37 at the time of making the film and therefore, in his own words, ‘not the 25-year-old wunderkind’. The film’s characters, however, are in their early twenties, perhaps younger, and highly literate, though their experience of the topics they like to discuss – love, sex, religion, the meaning of life – does not often match the range of their vocabulary. This naivety, exposed by frequent comic mistakes and misunderstandings, is what makes the characters, framed by Stillman’s benevolent gaze, vulnerable and therefore sympathetic.

It is an aspect of Metropolitan’s treatment of class that privilege should be tied up with vulnerability. Beyond the drawing-room comedy of haughty Sally declaring: ‘I can’t stand snobbery or snobbish attitudes of any kind’, there is little expression of easy entitlement. Instead, the film is full of self-questioning and unease at the perspective of social decline and a descent into irrelevance. Charlie, the group’s philosopher, a wonderful study in gentle bespectacled anxiety, is constantly voicing his sense of being on the brink of extinction. In fact, he decrees, there are no more preppies left, and he and his class should more properly be renamed Urban Haute Bourgeoisie – or U.H.B., pronounced ‘uhb’.

This elegiac mood is pervasive: when somebody mentions the grand St Regis Hotel, redolent of the Old New York of the Gilded Age, the response is: ‘They’ll probably knock it down soon.’ Tom, the socialist interloper, reads Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West at bedtime, and also declares his amazement, after having read Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, at finding that such decadent things as debutante parties still go on. When Audrey is rescued by Tom and Charlie from what they fear might be a dangerous orgy in the Hamptons, she is in fact decorously reading Louis Auchincloss’s 1964 novel The Rector of Justin, which is about the collapse of high-minded traditional WASP society values.

And it is Audrey who is Metropolitan’s pillar of hope, because she is Austen’s spokeswoman in the story, and expresses Stillman’s love of Austen’s worldview. A contrarian heroine who cleaves to her principles, Audrey is the modern-Manhattan avatar of Mansfield Park’s Fanny Price. Austenian, too, is the love triangle between sincere and virtuous Audrey, the obtuse Tom, and the original object of his longing, icy Serena. There is also Rick Von Sloneker (Will Kempe), a spectacularly objectionable cad.

In a series of telling exchanges, Tom tells Audrey that ‘nearly everything Jane Austen wrote is near ridiculous by today’s standards’, singling out Mansfield Park, and quoting the literary critic Lionel Trilling’s essay about the novel, in which he deems the insufferably virtuous Fanny impossible to like and calls her opposition to the theatricals organised by the Crawford siblings indefensible. Audrey disagrees: not only does she like Fanny and Mansfield Park. She has also, it turns out, read Austen, unlike Tom, who declares stoutly: ‘I don’t read novels. I prefer good literary criticism. That way you get both the novelist’s idea as well as the critic’s thinking.’

Later on, Audrey does in fact model Fanny’s morality in action by trying to stop the Sally Fowler Rat Pack from playing Truth or Dare – another example of what might seem to others an indefensible prohibition of innocent fun. The game does go ahead, and it proves to be, as Audrey had warned, dangerous and upsetting.

Audrey’s character signals that moral choices are inescapable, and that individual freedom should not be prized above the needs of a stable and harmonious society. This also matters because, as Metropolitan demonstrates, even the most tightly knit little group of friends is threatened by atomisation and loneliness. Sally’s open-house policy, which provided a precious space for social communion, ends abruptly as the string of debutante parties stop and individual pursuits take over. But at this point a band of three has formed – Audrey, Tom and Charlie – whom we last see, slightly wiser and more freewheeling perhaps, walking along the road arm-in-arm hoping to hitch a ride back into Manhattan.

Asked about why his films have endured, Stillman has observed that this may be because none of them try to be of the moment and because, being smaller independent films, ‘they were never overexposed, which leaves space for a discovery process, for word of mouth’. Metropolitan yields new rewards upon successive re-watchings. In its quiet courteous way, it shatters the myth of America as a classless society by foregrounding the traditionally discreet and reticent scions of Old Money. There are few equivalents of this in more combatively class-conscious British cinema – Joanna Hogg’s Souvenir diptych of films being an exception. It is also one of the great Christmas films, wintry and low-lit, and featuring a spectacular Christmas service at St Thomas Episcopal Church in the midst of which Audrey stands, a picture of stoic sorrow. It is that rare and precious thing: a very entertaining comedy about virtue – and the perfect partner for Mansfield Park.