The Party
The opening scene of The Party, it turns out, is also the beginning of the final scene. We don’t see the film’s last seconds until it loops back to the end, but, be forewarned at the onset: This party will go out of bounds.
The Party is a dark cerebral comedy from British writer-director Sally Potter, the woman behind such brilliantly challenging productions as Orlando and Yes. Shot in black and white, The Party’s cinematography turns every facial crease into a chasm and every shadow into an abyss. The film stock is gritty as life itself. The film also alludes to Potter’s probable inspiration, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, in which an academic couple played by Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor host a get-together that unravels into drunken recrimination.
Like Virginia Woolf, The Party is an extended conversation set inside a married couple’s claustrophobic book-filled rooms. One difference is that here, the husband, Bill (Timothy Spall), may be a prestigious history professor, but the wife, Janet (Kristin Scott Thomas), is the careerist of greatest importance. She’s about to become minister of health and is throwing a soirée with her closest friends to celebrate. Ironically, Bill chooses the occasion to announce that his health has failed, diagnosis: “terminal.”
But the mood is a bit on edge even before Bill’s revelation, despite Janet’s best efforts at playing the unflappable hostess. Always pushing the boundary is Janet’s best friend April (Patricia Clarkson), who pricks the victory party balloon by announcing, “I think democracy is finished.” Janet insists that change is possible through politics but April will have none of it. She’s a disillusioned idealist—all those marches led nowhere—and her cynicism is directed against the pretenses of everyone present, including her German boyfriend, the gnomic life coach Gottfried (Bruno Ganz). Clarkson delivers April’s jabs with Mike Tyson confidence; Scott Thomas is perfectly cast, her beautiful composure disintegrates along with Janet’s liberal pieties as the evening deteriorates.
Ducking into the kitchen, Janet, whispering eagerly into her cellphone, is obviously having an affair despite lavish professions of gratitude to her husband. But she dissolves into righteous indignation when Bill announces his own infidelity, an affair with a young grad student who happens to be the wife of another guest at the party, Tom (Cillian Murphy), a banker whose brain is racing like Le Mans after snorting a line in the bathroom. The lesbian couple, woman’s studies professor Martha (Cherry Jones) and her young protégé Jinny (Emily Mortimer), begin to splinter after Bill reveals his affair with Martha years earlier in college.
“Men are not the enemy. That debate is over,” Martha insists. “That dates you—sisterhood is a very aged concept,” April snaps. And so goes The Party as intellectualized recriminations fly from all sides. “Western doctors know nothing at all,” Gottfried insists, fending off the professed rationalism, the faith in science, shared by most of the guests.
When conversation turns to Bill’s affair with Tom’s wife, the professor opines that what she wants is love, not money. “Everyone needs money!” the banker shoots back. “Money bought this house, not your fucking ideas!”
Secrets and lies continue to surface in a milieu where everyone is blinded by their own preconceptions, intellectually and ethically. April is perhaps the most clear-headed of the lot, regardless of whether she’s wrong or right. “Direct action—that’s what gets things done,” she tells Janet. Spoiler alert: on the political far left, direct action can be code for violence.
