Film Marcus Berkmann
THE PARTY (15) KINGSMAN: THE GOLDEN CIRCLE (18)
The very best thing about The Party (15) is that it’s only 71 minutes long.
I wonder what its budget was, as a proportion of the budget for the Blade Runner sequel. A tenth? A fiftieth? No computer graphics here, no vast landscapes or bludgeoning soundtracks destroying what remains of your hearing. Just a few eminent actors in a house, at a party that goes badly wrong. One could have guessed from the outset that the vol-au-vents would be badly burned – and so they are.
Kristin Scott Thomas is the hostess with the leastest, for she has been appointed the Shadow Minister for Health and has invited her best friends around to celebrate. It’s quite an international selection, for it includes Patricia Clarkson (US) and her dippy alternative-therapist husband, Bruno Ganz (Germany), a lesbian couple (Cherry Jones, US, and Emily Mortimer, UK) and Cillian Murphy (Ireland). Sitting in the centre of the room, playing terrible old jazz records, is Kristin’s husband, Timothy Spall, looking thin and haunted in an old man’s beard.
Everybody’s a bit on edge, for important plot-related reasons; for revelation will follow revelation, until you expect someone to tell you they once slept with the chicken they’re all having for dinner.
Why is Murphy carrying a gun, and how much cocaine does he need to get him through the evening? How pregnant is Mortimer exactly? Why does Spall never answer a question with a simple statement? And how did Scott Thomas attain the summit of political life without realising that her friends were all dangerous fruitcakes?
With performances all slightly higher and riper than you might expect, this is the sort of film that is usually based on some famous piece of theatrical trickery that ran on Broadway for 20 years, but in fact it’s an original script by writerdirector Sally Potter. It was Potter who, 20 years ago, gave us a sublime Orlando, starring Tilda Swinton as the transgenderiste Virginia Woolf heroine, but this isn’t in the same class. People constantly say things you’re not sure they would say, or anyone would say, and sometimes it feels as though the lines are in the wrong order.
Patricia Clarkson, for instance, has the familiar role of the over-worldly cynic, uttering one-liner after one-liner, but the gags aren’t quite acute or funny enough. It’s odd and not entirely unpleasurable to watch something like this misfire so very slightly. You leave the cinema thinking not about the character’s stories, but wondering just how the film could have been put right. We are all critics now.
Kingsman: The Golden Circle (18), by contrast, is a piece of nonsense with an enormous budget and barely any reason to exist at all. It’s a tongue-in-cheek spy thriller, with Colin Firth as an up-to-date John Steed, complete with three-piece suit and rolled umbrella, and Taron Egerton as his cockney sidekick. Julianne Moore is a deranged villain hiding out in the jungles of Cambodia, for which insult the Cambodian authorities banned the film. The best joke is that she has kidnapped Elton John to play his greatest hits in an enormous auditorium for an audience of, at most, two.
Elton turns up several times through the film, having tantrums, as we all know he does in real life, and every time he appears, you laugh out loud. If you had told me that the best thing I’d see in a film this month was Elton John swearing, I would never have believed you, but that’s how low we’re currently going.