The Party

Dir: Sally Potter

2017

***

If I had seen Sally Potter’s 2017 film The Party in a small theatre somewhere I would have been absolutely thrilled. It isn’t actually based on a play but it certainly feels like it could be. I would describe it as a recorded piece of theatre but in the style of a neo-noir satire. It’s filmed in a beautifully rich black and white and it reminded me of a cross between an early John Cassavetes film and a Harold Pinter play. However, this is classic Sally Potter, the characters are brilliantly performed but they certainly come from her. The characters, script and performances are superb, the film/play could have been performed on an undecorated sound stage or filmed in a featureless room, but the fact that Potter chose to film it so beautifully in the style that she has, shows that she is the master of both stage and screen. It’s a great little intellectual satire, featuring Kristin Scott Thomas as Janet, an MP who has just been given a ministerial position on the shadow cabinet after many years of campaigning. Deciding to celebrate the occasion, she invites close friends round for a meal and a drink. Her husband Bill (Timothy Spall) remains silent in the centre of the room listening to music as the guests begin to arrive. Cherry Jones plays Martha, a professor of Feminism and old university chum of Bills and Emily Mortimer plays her wife Jinny, who announces she is pregnant with triplets as soon as she arrives to the gathering. Patricia Clarkson plays April, a self-confessed cynic and realist and oldest friend of Janet’s, while her aged hippie partner Gottfried is played by Bruno Ganz. The old friends talk of politics and the future until Cillian Murphy’s Tom arrives in a nervous and excitable state, with a bag of cocaine in one pocket, and a gun in the other. The story is unpredictable and unravels at a perfect pace. The plot however, doesn’t seem to me to be the most important aspect of the story. For me, the best bit is the characters and the script, with Patricia Clarkson and Cherry Jones bagging the most interesting roles by far. Jones is great as the older partner who is clearly struggling to comprehend a life with three children while Clarkson acts as the film’s cutting narrator, correcting everyone and pointing out each persons faults. You can see that both characters are friends but you’d think that they hated each other. Kristin Scott Thomas’ Janet has worked tirelessly to get a ministerial position since they were all young political activists but now that she’s in a strong position they have all become political stereotypes and come across as less enthusiastic. When Bill declares he is gravely ill and has been seen privately (Janet has been appointed as shadow health secretary for the NHS) the satirical flood gates open and the comedy flows dark and fast. Everything about the film is top notch, that is until the end. It builds up to a grand finale rather well but the climax itself comes across, I think, as a cheap and tired twist. We are shown a sneak peak at the finale in the film’s beginning scene before the credits, so we have an idea of the end scenario, just not how we got there, who was to blame and who the recipient of a certain act would be. I really enjoyed the rich satire, but what started as a classic Potter play with hints of Cassavetes and Pinter, ended up being rather like a cheap Ray Cooney comedy. It was a bit of a kick to be honest that made me glad that it was a relatively short film, but after such great performances and such a great script, it is in fact something of a tragedy.