The Party is a 2018 drama about a woman who hosts a party to celebrate her new promotion, but once the guests arrive becomes clear that not everything is going to go down as smoothly as the red wine.
It’s not a stretch by any means to call your average movie watch a sort of manufactured experience, the whole thing a set of values carefully calculated and set in motion by decades of tinkering with a limited set of ingredients that have mostly worn to a nub the creative impact of most major studio productions. It’s why when something different comes along, something that challenges these expectations, it’s cause for a little celebration, and in no uncertain term, does this qualify for riding-on-the-third-rail director Sally Potter‘s latest bit of madness, The Party, an absolute must see that strikes with delicious impact.
It begins with implied violence as a ragged looking Janet (Kristin Scott Thomas) opens the door for us to enter only to aim a pistol in our face. We cut back a bit in time and learn that she’s just been named the new Minister of Health while her husband Bill (Timothy Spall) sits in a chair looking a bit despondent, wallowing in booze and succumbing to the numbing effects of old time jazz. Enter a pair of guests, April (Patricia Clarkson), a friend with an eccentric older boyfriend, Gottfried (Bruno Ganz) joining them for a celebratory dinner party. Others arrive, including Martha (Cherry Jones) and her younger wife, Jinny (Emily Mortimer), who’s pregnant with triplets, and then Tom (Cillian Murphy), who comes without his spouse, nervously claiming she’ll come soon. As the night progresses, Bill lets fly a terrible confession and soon the floodgates are open as scathing conversations on life, health, loyalty and more run roughshod over an evening of proposed happiness.
The Party is a marvel of juxtaposition, its title alone setting the stage for one direction before heading in another. A quick watch at only a few minutes over an hour, this is a fiery character explosion that drops us right into the boiling water. Janet is on the phone sporadically with some unseen and unheard person that is clearly motivating her emotionally; April is a cauldron of cynical spite and bitter remarks; Tom frequents the bathroom for snorts and is packing a gun along with a tremendous sense of urgency, while Gottfried sits on the floor with a dull smile, his dogma-centered spiritual enlightenment crushed by just about everything else in the house.
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Potter is working in minimalism, from the economical runtime and stark black & white to the limited set, filmed mostly in a cramped living room where she works her camera about the space in a jittery rampage using wide angular observational moments and intense close-ups that make great use of these talented actor’s expressive faces. It’s a game of timing that Potter plays out with incredible balance where each word is always countered by a decidedly divisive other. This is a battle of intellect, rational versus irrational, traditional versus spiritual, and its waged with verbal sabers that rattle unchecked in this tiny ring. What’s so unsettling (in a good way) is how deftly it plays out in their world as harrowing drama but in our eyes always as somehow funny, even if the laughs are not exactly primed as you’d expect. Trim yet volatile, this is a sensational alternative to the grind.