"The Party" (2017)

Sally Potter’s recent career trajectory has been quite interesting. Having spent the 1990s and 2000s exploring the varying ways with which personal and group identity affect perception (The Tango Lesson), societal status (Orlando, The Man Who Cried) and interpersonal relationships (Yes), she has since taken a more overtly political shift, using her characters’ multiplicity of lived experiences and points of view to critique the radical chic middle class she grew and blossomed in. After satirizing society of the spectacle values in the bold but ultimately shallow fashion mystery Rage and examining the deleterious effects of politics as escapism in the splendid coming-of-age drama Ginger & Rosa, her latest film continues its predecessor’s dissection of liberal hypocrisies.

Set entirely in a posh London apartment, The Party observes the disintegration of seven privileged elites’ marriages and lives as (presumably Labour) party apparatchik Janet (Kristin Scott Thomas) celebrates her access to power with husband Bill (Timothy Spall) and a select group of five friends: Caustic cynic April (Patricia Clarkson), her New Age healer of a soon-to-be-ex-partner Gottfried (Bruno Ganz), cocaine-addled stockbroker Tom (Cillian Murphy), women’s studies professor Martha (Cherry Jones) and her pregnant wife Jinny (Emily Mortimer). The announcement of unpleasant news regarding Bill’s health starts a chain-reaction of revelations and developments that confront these people’s moral and philosophical convictions to the reality of human nature.

As in Blake Edwards’ similarly-titled Hollywood satire, Potter uses the uninvited guest (in this case, Bill’s illness) as the disruptor of established order, exposing behaviours, codes and motivations to scrutiny. What separates Potter’s film from Edwards’ and other similarly-structured plays and films is the direct link she draws between her characters’ egoism and the politics that form the foundation of their lives; guest or host, every guilty party’s outburst is sparked by the pressure their political narcissism exerts on their lives.

The resulting tension between the personal and the political is what infuses the dialogue with its incisiveness; Martha’s justification for allowing a friend to use her apartment for extra-marital trysts (“I thought it better than in your house”) is only slightly funnier than the wronged party’s self-aggrandizing claims of “saving our country from profiteering butchery”. Professional capitalist Tom’s raw-nerved emotionality is informed by a common-man conservatism provides a magnificent foil to both Gottfried’s maddeningly calm pseudo-philosophical platitudes and Bill’s neoliberal bourgeois smugness (“Money bought this house, not fucking ideas!” he retorts to the latter’s intellectual penis-waving). In one of the film’s more bittersweetly funny moments, April piercingly summarizes generational feminist rifts by gently reminding a betrayed Janet that “sisterhood is a very ageing concept.”

Potter, of course, is not critiquing beliefs themselves so much as examining what happens when we demand our politics define our relations to one another and dictate our conduct. No matter how cruel, selfish or arrogant her characters may behave, her style evidences her innate sympathy for them; note how the soft black-and-white cinematography and light-handed camera movements with which she films this verbal internecion resembles 1960s independent cinema. In doing so, she effectively casts the characters’ failings in the ambience in which the ideals behind them were conceived, lending an underlying nostalgic poignancy to every cut and blow they exchange. It’s a subtle touch that exemplifies Potter’s knack for visualizing her protagonists’ feelings through light, colour and shadow.

Running at a grand total of 71 minutes, The Party is a brisk and pleasant watch but no less sharp or fulfilling for it. Without quite reaching the profundity of Ettore Scola’s similarly-themed epic We All Loved Each Other So Much, Potter nevertheless dissects Britain’s ruling political class with the knowing accuracy only a fellow member could achieve.