Film Review: The Party

Gleefully nasty, zinger-packed and over in 71 minutes, Sally Potter's dark drawing-room comedy is her zestiest work in ages. It may have its uses in describing butter cookies and cat videos, but its fair to say that short and sweet is an over-applied compliment: Sometimes its better to be short and severely, cheek-shrivelingly sour. So

Gleefully nasty, zinger-packed and over in 71 minutes, Sally Potter's dark drawing-room comedy is her zestiest work in ages.

It may have its uses in describing butter cookies and cat videos, but it’s fair to say that “short and sweet” is an over-applied compliment: Sometimes it’s better to be short and severely, cheek-shrivelingly sour. So it proves in “The Party,” a deliciously heightened, caviar-black comedy that sets up its brittle, bourgeois characters like bowling pins and gleefully knocks them down in 71 minutes flat. Slight and self-contained, it won’t go down in cinema history as anything but, perhaps, the most purely fun film ever made by peculiar British experimentalist Sally Potter. Still, this sketch of an ambitious Westminster politician and dinner-party hostess (Kristin Scott Thomas), whose life comes spectacularly apart before the canapés are even served, is a consummate drawing-room divertissement, played with relish by a dream ensemble. Notwithstanding a somewhat strained twist, it’s as slender, sharp and snappish as a wishbone; chic arthouse distributors should RSVP to this “Party” without delay.

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Premiering in competition at Berlin, Potter’s film plays as a kind of antidote to Oren Moverman’s “The Dinner” in the same section. Both films chart the disastrous fallout as assorted secrets are uncovered at a dinner event organized by a political bigwig, but where Moverman’s film, with its grandiose Gettysburg allusions, reveals a pained social conscience, Potter’s is quite content to ridicule its middle-class subjects without taking a defined moral position on their foibles and failings. Think of it as a quinoa-classes update of Mike Leigh’s evergreen “Abigail’s Party”: Its gaze is fixed a few notches higher up the social ladder, but the characters are just as plagued by petty aspirationalism.

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After opening with one of those all-too-ubiquitous flash-forward shots, with a harried-looking Janet (Scott Thomas) aiming a gun at an unseen target, the film jauntily works its way to that climax. It’s early evening, and guests are beginning to arrive at Janet’s elegant Victorian home in a leafy part of London — raising a toast to her recent appointment as Health Minister. First up is her acidly cynical best friend April (a never-more-waspish Patricia Clarkson), a former idealist who congratulates Janet in the same breath as declaring democracy “finished.”

April regards her boyfriend Gottfried (Bruno Ganz), an anti-political humanist life coach, with eye-rolling contempt, though that counts as affection relative to her scorching dismissal of another pair of guests: dour academic Martha (Cherry Jones), a specialist in “gender differentiation on American utopianism,” and her newly pregnant partner Jinny (Emily Mortimer), who squabble over the correct degree of radical feminism to assume these days. An illiberal outlier among the guests is Prada-suited, cocaine-dusted finance shark Tom (a fine, antic Cillian Murphy), whose wife is mysteriously delayed; still, she’s practically more present at the party than Janet’s husband Bill (played in deliberately, comically checked-out fashion by Timothy Spall), who eventually rouses himself from a glazed fug of ennui to deliver the first of several sequential bombshells.

It’d poop “The Party,” so to speak, to reveal anything further — though this is less a plot-based exercise than a tipsily conversational one. Potter’s eminently quotable screenplay works up just enough narrative momentum to sustain a barrage of killer one-liners: With the hors d’oeuvres increasingly unlikely to be served, decorum is swiftly shed and these privileged vultures instead feed ravenously on each other’s ideals. “Tickle an aromatherapist and you’ll find a fascist,” April drily observes as even the most genteel guests begin to show their colors, and multiple relationships go into instant shock therapy.

It’s never specified to which political party Janet belongs — though she’s an ardent defender of the National Health Service, so she’s probably no Theresa May sympathizer — but she appears here so airily removed from the outside world that it hardly matters. Whichever side she’s on, it’s one opposed by April, brilliantly played by Clarkson as the kind of self-styled truth-teller who actually conceals a lot of herself in her blanket nihilism. (“Pretending hasn’t worked for your party for a while,” she tells Janet — and she could be talking about either her political party or this particular botched occasion.) “The Party” flatters neither woman’s position, nor the other guests’ ideological perches in between. Everyone at this woebegone soiree comes off as slightly absurd in what could be read as a blasé, from-within satire of the “metropolitan elite” so savaged by U.K. conservatives of late.

One shouldn’t pull a muscle, however, in reaching for the subtext of Potter’s witty shaggy-dog story: Its giddy in-the-moment pleasures are enough, even if a final kicker of a reveal doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in retrospect. While this kind of chamber material risks seeming plucked from the stage — it isn’t, incidentally — Alexey Rodionov’s nimble monochrome lensing and Anders Refn and Emilie Orsini’s antsy editing lend Potter’s script a propulsively cinematic, bouncing-off-the-walls quality, smartly drawing to a close just as the joke threatens to wear thin. (Refn has collaborated with Lars von Trier in the past, and “The Party” sometimes does exude the splintery air of a glossier Dogme 95 exercise.)

Potter’s cast, meanwhile, is perceptibly having a blast with her savory invective and insults: There’s nothing to dislike about a film that gives Patricia Clarkson the chance to tell Cherry Jones that she’s “a first-rate lesbian and a second-rate thinker.” Months after the U.S. election campaign turned an intended jibe into a rallying cry, Sally Potter’s latest further proves that there’s pleasure, pride or both to be taken in being a nasty woman.

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Film Review: ‘The Party’

Reviewed at Berlin Film Festival (competing), Feb. 13, 2017. Running time: 71 MIN.

  • Production: (U.K.-Denmark)  A Great Point Media presentation of an Adventure Pictures production in association with Oxwich Media Ltd., Copenhagen Film Fund. (International sales: Great Point Media, London.) Produced by Christopher Sheppard, Kurban Kassam. Executive producers, Jim Reeve, Robert Halmi Jr., John Giwa-Amu. Co-producer, Michael Manzi.
  • Crew: Directed, written by Sally Potter. Camera (B&W, widescreen), Alexey Rodionov. Editors, Anders Refn, Emilie Orsini.
  • With: Patricia Clarkson, Bruno Ganz, Cherry Jones, Emily Mortimer, Cillian Murphy, Kristin Scott Thomas, Timothy Spall.

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