The Party (2017)
Tension fraught deliciousness.
This is a dinner where truths explode & damnation ensues.
What a treat Sally Potter’s -The Party- is!. I love a good dinner party centric film- why like any good meal it entices with the entree and finishes sweetly.
— This is a film charged with tension.
Janet(Kristen Scott- Thomas) has been made the Assitant Minister of Health. She’s a feminisit’s triumph, as her friends do cry, and to celebrate her announcement she’s hosting a dinner party for her closet compatriots, who could easily mask as her enemies.
As they indivudally arrive the air is filled with enticing lies and drama. And we tick down the minutes until altercations with occur.
The Party- runs at 71 minutes & is bitingly frank.
Each character is flawed by their secrete keeping and we wait in glee to find out each ones hidden wrongs.
Janet flirtatiously liaises with a secret phone companion.
Her husband Bill (Timothy Sprall) is drunk in the dining room.
Friend April (Patricia Clarkson) pretends she wants nothing to do with her liberal, albeit dogmatic, German lover Gottfried(Bruno Ganz).
Newlywed couple Martha (Cherry Jones), and Jinny (Emily Mortimer) seem uncomfortable in each other’s company despite their joyous, slightly intense, pregnant news.
Meanwhile Tom( Cillian Murphy), who everyone seems to forget is there, oddly fades into the background without the copmpany of his wife Mariann, who is the dinner party’s common link. Instead he takes his uncomfortableness straight to the bathroom where he can play with his gun and be overcome by coked up sweatiness .
Yes this dinner party is built on Jenga like lies and we watch eagerly as Janet pretends she believes her friends well wishes and congratulations.
The black and white imagery heightens the tense atmosphere.
While the disciplined running length ensures no guest outstays their welcome.
The film is like sharp satires of old . It provides well time objectives while leaving room for fertile imagination.
At it’s heart The Party is a social comment on the falseness of our established friendships. We may pretend to enjoy each other’s company and respectively need others in our lives, but the external hour or so of insight into other’s private worlds illustrates just have false friendships do become. Potter just does so in a way which is continuously humourous.
BUT people be warned the quick jibes offered throughout do not go unnoticed.
Everyone is flawed in Potter’s film, and quite rightly so given our social structures and human nature. This is a quick film but a good one and one I implore you to watch.
It is satirical, relevant and I promise you you’ll have a least one chuckle throughout watching it.
I give it 85/100 ‘You’re a first class lesbian and a second rate thinker’ yes these are the comments one should expect from their friends.
Highlights:
- The simply narrative which conveys real life moments.
- The convention of someones joy always be taken by another’s pain.
- The fallible nature of friendships.
Lowlights:
- I would have loved the ending to be slightly more played out or at least paused at the finish.
- Martha and Jilly had no chemistry and it made little sense how/why they were continued to be together.
