The Party

I only needed to see ten seconds of the trailer to know this was one party I didn’t want to miss. This is my idea of good dark comedy (I knew that a B&W film called The Party just had to be dark). People dying, people cheating on each other, people screaming at each other, people pointing guns at each other. What fun!

Sally Potter has brought together the perfect cast for her film and they are uniformly excellent: Kristin Scott Thomas is Janet, the host of the party. She’s a politician (in London) who has just been appointed to an important position (it remains a mystery for a while), so she holds a party to celebrate. What could be more exciting and innocent? But then why is her husband, Bill (Timothy Spall), sitting in a chair in the middle of the living room, looking like his wife has just died? And why does Tom (Cillian Murphy) come without his wife, Marianne (Janet’s colleague), and then immediately hide himself in the bathroom and pull out a gun? And why does Janet’s cynical friend, April (Patricia Clarkson), continuously belittle her partner, Gottfried (Bruno Ganz), who calls himself a spiritual healer? And why are Martha (Cherry Jones) and Jinny (Emily Mortimer), who are a couple, fighting about Martha’s announcement that she is pregnant with three boys? For the answers, you’ll have to watch this delightful dark film yourself.

The Party is full of intelligent witty dialogue and brilliant social satire (with some things to discuss afterwards). Filming it in B&W (the cinematography is beautiful) was a great idea because it somehow both enhances the feel that we’re watching a stage play while making it something different. The Party is very short (71 minutes), which also works perfectly for a film like this. The only thing that keeps me from giving The Party four stars is the coldness and the lack of truly profound ideas. The Party gets a solid ***+. My mug is up.