Dark comedy lights up ‘The Party’
A gifted cast and an artfully crafted script lead to a funny satire
Sally Potter has never been afraid of Virginia Woolf.
The British director tackled Woolf’s novel “Orlando” — the 400-year philosophical saga of a noble androgyne blessed with the gift of eternal life — and turned it into one of the most dazzling films of the 1990s, with considerable help from Tilda Swinton.
“The Party,” Ms. Potter’s delicious black comedy at hand, borrows its structural idea not from “Orlando” but from the acclaimed Edward Albee play invoking Woolf’s name. Here, the burning rhetorical question is along the lines of, “Who’s Afraid of Betty Friedan?”
Janet (Kristin Scott Thomas) is throwing a little soiree in her London flat to celebrate her appointment as “shadow” Minister for Health — a stepping stone to the opposition party’s leadership. It’s just for an elite few of her nearest and dearest. Would you like to come in and meet the guests?
Albee had a quartet of academics. Ms. Potter has an octet of them: There’s Bill (Timothy Spall), of course — Janet’s devoted, self-effacing husband, who seems quite ill. Here’s April (Patricia Clarkson), Janet’s cynical American best friend, with her German husband Gottfried (Bruno Ganz). Pretty young Jinny (Emily Mortimer) and her much older partner, Martha (Cherry Jones), are out on the back porch.
Tom (Cillian Murphy), a devilishly handsome, impeccably dressed investment banker, bursts in with a frenzy of apologies for his wife, who’ll be arriving late.
But the joyous occasion begins to curdle well before dinner is served. Actually, dinner never quite gets served at all, overtaken by some long-festering secrets that surface with a kind of domino effect. For starters: Bill says his illness is terminal. Jinny is pregnant — with triplets. April and Gottfried are splitting up. (“This is our last supper,”she intones.) Infidelity abounds.
So what’s Tom so agitated about? Why does he head instantly and repeatedly to the bathroom for coke hits? In fact, he has to battle Jinny (who is throwing up with morning sickness) for that lavatory, which is the busiest room in the house. It’s also where Janet and April have their most crucial and decisive confabs.
No more hints or plot points, lest I spoil Ms. Potter’s artfully crafted script, whose best mystery isn’t even addressed — let alone solved — until the film’s final shot.
It’s a kind of British Woody Allen ensemble piece, filmed sequentially (which is important for the actors) in beautifully claustrophobic black-and-white. One can’t say enough about the tart metaphysical discussions among these eggheads and the many yuks in the dialogue that allow Ms. Clarkson, as the relentlessly sarcastic April, to dominate if not steal the show.
“You’re a first-class lesbian and a second-rate thinker,” she growls to Martha. “It must be all those women’s studies.”
“Oh, really, April,” Martha replies, “I am a professor — specializing in domestic labor, gender differentiation and American utopianism.”
“My point exactly,” says April.
When all the excrement hits the rotary oscillator, gentle Gottfried tells Bill: “It’s good this is all coming out, but now I think you need to protect yourself from so much negative female energy.”
The whole sterling cast shines.
“The Party” is by far the funniest film yet from such a “serious British experimentalist.” It has a wild, almost absurdist humor we don’t associate with writer-director Potter and haven’t seen from her before, including a wonderfully bizarre choice of music (from Bo Didley’s “I’m a Man” to Purcell’s “When I Am Laid”) that makes everyone nervous.
She has fashioned a smart, nasty parlor piece that skewers the hypocrisies of its characters’ liberal mores. Stagey, to be sure — but theatrically delightful.
Do such sophisticated intellectuals — the life of this “Party” — go for revenge or reconciliation?
See this raucous little tragicomic satire to find out for yourself.