Kristin Scott Thomas, Patricia Clarkson, Bruno Ganz
“THE PARTY” My rating: B
71 minutes | MPAA rating: R
With a running of time just over an hour, Sally Potter’s “The Party” plays like a classic one-act play, filled with slamming door exits, fiercely funny wordplay and wonderfully brittle, self-delusional characters.
Potter, the British creator of films like “Orlando” and “The Tango Lesson,” specializes in gender issues and anti-establishment politics. “The Party” embraces all that while remaining bitterly hilarious.
In the film’s first shot a frantic looking woman (Kristin Scott Thomas) yanks open her front door, stares momentarily at the visitor on her stoop (the camera takes the vantage point of the guest) and points a pistol at us.
We then flash back 70 minutes. That same woman, Janet, is busily futzing around the kitchen, preparing to entertain some old friends. Her husband Bill (Timothy Spall) sits in the living room, wine glass in hand, deejaying old blues and experimental jazz LPs. He has the look of a shell-shocked combat vet.
One by one the visitors arrive and we gradually learn what the celebration is about. After years of struggle as a party faithful, Janet has been named head of the country’s Ministry of Health. She is constantly interrupted by congratulatory phone calls, including several heavy-breathing text messages from an unidentified lover.
The deliciously catty April (Patricia Clarkson) is allegedly Janet’s best bud. As an American she takes a withering outsider’s view of Brit politics…but then she’s withering on just about every subject. Asked to evaluate if Janet’s new job has transformed her in any way, April observes that her friend now is “slightly ministerial in a post-modernist, post-feminist sort of way.”
She’s even harder on her boyfriend, a blissed-out, New Age-y German life coach named Gottfried (Bruno Ganz) who so adores her that he puts up with a constant stream of abuse. April announces that she intends to dump Gottfried that very night: “Tickle an aroma therapist and you find a fascist.”
Timothy Spall, Cilliam Murphy, Emily Mortimer, Patricia Clarkson
There’s the lesbian couple, Martha (Cherry Jones) and the much younger Jinny (Emily Mortimer). The latter announces that their in vitro fertilization treatments have worked with a vengeance — she is now carrying triplets. Martha does’t know whether to celebrate or mourn, noting that now she has to “get used to being a collective just when I was getting used to being a couple.”
Finally there’s the banker Tom (Cillian Murphy), who apologizes that his wife will arrive late because of work. April dismissively describes Tom as possessing “the mysterious ability to make millions out of other’s misfortunes.” Tom is obviously very nervous/distraught…he heads straight to the loo to snort coke off the bathtub ledge and fiddle with the automatic pistol carried beneath his suit coat in a shoulder holster.
(Potter is here toying with the dramatic principle known as Chekhov’s Gun: If in Act I you introduce a firearm, by Act III you’d damn well better make sure someone pulls the trigger.)
Before it’s all over one character will admit to having a fatal disease, old love affairs will be disinterred, and fresh adulteries will proliferate. There will be biting comments about dead-end intellectualism, the national health service, the frustrations of fidelity and the excesses of capitalism.
These are delivered with the year’s most sizzlingly snarky dialogue:
APRIL: “Martha, you’re a first-class lesbian and a second-rate thinker. Must be all those women’s studies.”
MARTHA: “I am a professor specializing in domestic labor, gender differentiation and American utopianism.”
APRIL: “My point exactly.”
The entire cast is pitch perfect, and Clarkson is even better than that.
Technically the film is a small marvel, unfolding in real time and featuring sumptuous widescreen black-and-white cinematography by Aleksei Rodionov that turns Janet and Bill’s modestly claustrophobic home into a vast battlefield of egos.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 
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