Review by © Jane Freebury
The Party brings a bunch of people together in the comfortable middle-class environs of London, at the home of Janet, Kristin Scott Thomas in the role, and her husband Bill, a more than usually lugubrious Timothy Spall. Everyone has a secret to divulge.
Each character represents a segment of the influential elite. There’s someone from financial services, there’s a politician, there are two academics, and there’s a wellness coach and on-trend chef.
Bill has a droll routine as he puts records on the turntable, then announces that he has a terminal illness. That is bad enough, but hey, there is more in store yet for Janet.
The posh environs in London today may be more polite than Hornsby, Sydney, in the late 1960s when the notorious election night classic, Don’s Party, is set. But it isn’t the restraint that makes The Party fall short. It simply doesn’t gel.
Although not about to celebrate a change of government, it still looks ahead to the prospect of political change. Sometime down the track when the newly created shadow minister for health, (Scott Thomas), and her colleagues are voted into government.
Some cross-cutting between scenes looks great in the trailer, but deft promotional editing has elided the gaps and awkward pauses. The party goers, supposed to get really mad at each other, barely connect. Instead, they lounge around or stand stiffly stating their positions, firing their lines off into the undergrowth.
Someone gets slapped, another brandishes a gun, but it doesn’t for engagement make, and prospects for good argument turn in a damp squib. Talk about atomised.
There is every reason why the ‘polite party to skewer the middle classes’ formula has held up well over time, but hard as the actors try, it doesn’t work here. Given too little to do, they are defeated at every turn, even the mouthy Patricia Clarkson character, Janet’s old friend April. Cillian Murphy as a disturbed banker, Emily Mortimer as a pregnant chef in a same-sex marriage, and Bruno Ganz spouting new age banalities fare no better.
Mercifully short at 71 minutes, and filmed in artful black and white, The Party could have been a deliciously cynical demolition job on the types it portrays but Bill as DJ produces one of its few pleasures—a great playlist includes tracks from Bo Diddley and John Coltrane.
Writer-director Sally Potter has had a knack for surprising us. She teamed up with Tilda Swinton to wow us all with time travel and gender switching in Orlando in the early 1990s, then followed up with a romantic Tango Lesson in which she herself starred as student of the dance.
The Party, on the other hand, needed more work, not by the actors on set but by the writer before they got the call. It seems dashed off, an addendum to the 2015 British election during which it was written, and why it earned four stars in so many reviews is a mystery to me.
It’s clear what Potter had in mind, but when top actors can’t make it work, our gaze shifts to the filmmaker.
MA15+, 71 minutes
2 Stars
Also published at the Canberra Critics Circle