It’s her Party and she’ll stick with it
Hollywood called for the maverick British film-maker Sally Potter but she had other ideas, finds Stephanie Bunbury.
Few film-makers have held the line in the way Sally Potter has. In the early 90s, after the success of her lush, intellectually playful adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, she was the one to watch.
Then, she could have had her pick of glossy period scripts in Hollywood. Instead, she cast herself in The Tango Lesson (1997), about a film-maker who escapes the frustrations of meetings with movie executives by learning the tango.
Potter isn’t an actor’s bootlace, but she is a trained dancer. It was an awkward film, but it had an aesthetic conviction that appealed to fans. They saw it in cinemas, but there were sufficiently few of them to ensure that the director of Orlando was once again relegated to the cinematic margins. The game could have been on, but Potter wasn’t playing.
After a swerve into historical romance with The Man Who Cried (2000), she embraced what she called ‘‘barefoot cinema’’: films made with little money but also without any need for compromise. Yes (2004) was a drama about an affair between a Lebanese refugee and an Irish American scientist living in London, dealing with the cultural tensions involved in such an unequal partnership.
Rage (2009) was a murdermystery set in the New York fashion industry. The story was told entirely by talking heads (although the heads did include Judi Dench and Jude Law: Potter has never had any trouble drawing prominent actors to work with her).
The idea was that you could comfortably watch it on your phone. If you did, you could download it free. ‘‘I’ve always had an evolutionary approach to survival as a film-maker,’’ she told The Huffington Post at the time.
‘‘Those who adapt, survive; those who don’t become dinosaurs. So I figure that in this age of the terror of theft on the internet the cleverest thing to do is give it away.’’
As an economic model, Potter’s defiant approach has its drawbacks. She is 68 but still goes into debt to make each film, confident she will get back enough to go on living. The golden rule in productions is that you never invest in yourself. She doesn’t care; you can break the rule and nothing dreadful happens.
‘‘Once you discover that you don’t actually starve, every obstacle becomes an opportunity to redefine what you’re doing, a vehicle for transformation,’’ she said after she made Rage. ‘‘That’s perfect for taking the fear out of things.‘‘
Potter knew she wanted to make films from the age of 14, when a relative lent her an eight millimetre camera. ‘‘So I left school and struck out,’’ she told Time Out a few years ago.
‘‘I got jobs in restaurants, washing carrots, and joined the London Film-makers’ Co-op, making tiny, tiny films that just got bigger.‘‘ A short film called Thriller – a deconstruction of La Boheme – became her calling card.
Four years later, in 1983, she made an oddball feminist musical called The Gold Diggers, with Julie Christie playing a bizarre trophy wife, carried aloft by men with gold at her feet.
The film was comprehensively rubbished; a discouraged Potter concentrated for several years on dance, writing music for bands and performance art.
But then came Orlando, generally regarded as her masterpiece. Tilda Swinton played a 400-year-old human who was sometimes a man, sometimes a woman.
‘‘I was part of a movement that wanted to take everything to do with film-making apart, including the narrative,’’ Potter said at the time. ‘‘I’m now at the stage where I want to put it back together again. The story shows that it is hard to be a man and it’s hard to be a woman, how society shapes and drives these things called masculinity and femininity. But what is infinitely more important is our common humanity.’’
Potter doesn’t much like being labelled a feminist film-maker, even if she did start her career making a film with an all-women crew. ‘‘I’ve noticed that any female film director is called a feminist film director just because she’s female, which is just stupid. It’s lazy,’’ she told The Wip website.
‘‘I don’t use the word because I try and be more specific. The word feminist has become so general, it’s like a shorthand that almost is without meaning. Which isn’t to say that we don’t have very different experiences and are treated very differently because of gender.’’
In her last film, she r explored the possibilities of Loachian realism. Ginger and Rosa was a hit at the Toronto Film Festival in 2012. It is a sensitive, velvettextured film about the friendship between two earnest schoolgirls, played by Elle Fanning and Alice Englert. It is set in 1962, when US warships sailed into the Bay of Pigs, the apocalypse loomed and Potter herself was a teenage girl wagging school to go on anti-war marches.
A more immediate crisis cracks the girls apart, however, when Rosa embarks on a serious affair with Ginger’s bohemian father. Around the festival traps, the talk was that this would finally be Potter’s popular breakthrough, returning her to the glory days of Orlando. It wasn’t.
So she was back to scraping together funding and maxing out her credit card and writing a script for herself that could be made cheaply but that actors would love – with the result that her new film, The Party, features an all-star cast. Kristin Scott Thomas is an aspiring prime minister celebrating her move up the cabinet ranks to the health portfolio.
She is joined at the cocktail party from hell by Bruno Ganz, Timothy Spall, Cillian Murphy and a gloriously snippy Patricia Clarkson.
There are tensions between academic Martha (Cherry Jones) and her pregnant younger partner Jinny, played by Emily Mortimer. Shouldn’t they be full of expectant joy? Plus a gun is hidden in the bathroom. No good can possibly come of that.
Nobody has ever thought of Potter in connection with fun or farce, but that is the thing about her: no two of her films resemble each other, except in the sense that they are guided by her distinct, determined sensibility. That is the shape of a real career. – Sydney Morning Herald
"Any female film director is called a feminist film director just because she's female, which is stupid. It's lazy."
Sally Potter
❚ The Party (M) opens in select cinemas on February 22.