The Party (2017)

It's hard to believe that so many good actors and actresses, like Patricia Clarkson, Kristin Scott Thomas, Emily Mortimer, etc. could be involved with such a garbage film. The good thing was that it was only 71 minutes long, but it turned out to be a real slog getting through it. Nearly all of the characters are extremely unlikeable (most especially Cillian Murphy), and most of the film is the stereotypical "comedy of manners" where people make cutting remarks about each other in a very regal and polite way. In America, this is a 2018 release, and honestly, this has a very good chance of being the worst thing I see this year.

Fmovies: With a film which has a high rating as well as a few decent actors I was expecting something engaging. What I found however was that I could only stomach half an hour of this,I know it's a short film but that wasn't enough to keep me from removing myself from this party after 30 or so mins. This is one of the most pretentious movies I have ever sat down to watch. The problem I found was that there simply wasn't a single person in this movie you would want to be around for five mins never mind the full running time. What we have is a bunch of middle class selfish self centered stereotypes being passive aggressive towards each other and that's the big problem. It's just not believable that these people would spend time in each others company as there's no positive emotion flowing between any of them. The fact it's in black and white just adds to the pretension that this is somehow an intelligent film. There's no benefit to this being in black and white. I don't see this as a commentary on society or any social group, apart from the fact that people who claim to enjoy this movie will be as pretentious as the characters it's trying to mock. The movie lacks soul, doesn't engage and would likely only be enjoyed by those with sociopathic traits who enjoy watching people backbiting each other for their enjoyment.

This Potter film paints a bleak picture of modern people. There isn't ONE person in this cast of 7 whom the audience can really sympathise with. The 7 characters call themselves friends but treat each other with hostility, dishonesty etc. Too me it felt more like an unreal vacuum of lovelessness than a real group of people. Even the super-talented Cillian Murphy comes across as one-sided and overacting. The 'twist' at the end is also not very interesting and a bit of a cliché. I've seen much better work from Sally Potter!

The Party fmovies. A 71-minute movie in black-and-white seems a rather poor return on the price of a cinema ticket these days. The Party is a theatrical comedy - it would have to be half of a double bill on stage or perhaps better suited to a TV play. It's like a middle-class upgrading of THE ROYLE FAMILY relocated to somewhere like Hampstead or Swiss Cottage.

MP Janet (Kristin Scott Thomas) is hosting a drinks do to celebrate becoming a Shadow Minister (from sarcasm at Thatcher's expense we can safely infer that she is Labour). Her husband Bill (Timothy Spall) is weirded out after some bad news at the hospital. First guests to arrive are their best friend Patricia Clarkson (in uber-bitch overdrive) and partner Bruno Ganz, then a lesbian couple, then manic coke-snorting Cillian Murphy (at his dishiest), whose wife – though we never see her – provides all the drama. Infidelity (off-screen)is super-abundant and provides most of the humour.

They're (meant to be) a bunch of unlikeable phoneys, given some snappy dialogue by writer/director Sally Potter (who gave us ORLANDO in 1992 – now there was a weird movie). Unavoidable echoes of Mike Leigh's ABIGAIL'S PARTY (1977), which was much more more hysterical than Janet's celebration here. Slight and intermittently funny. Not very good value.

I'd been looking forward to seeing this. It just goes to show that one should never be taken in by a slickly made trailer or a stellar cast-list. What a disappointing load of old codswallop.

Script: abysmal. No attempt made to write anything approaching natural conversation. Dialogue was jagged and disjointed, lacking any genuine motivational flow. Sorry, but real people just DON'T interact like this. And as for it being a comedy, well you could have fooled me. I think I laughed three times, and two of them were little more than polite titters.

Pacing: what pacing? Whole scads of dialogue slouched by like a line of blinded soldiers. At one point I caught myself yawning.

Characterisation: seven characters flapping about on screen and not a single one of them believable: just 2-dimensional assemblages of histrionics. Consequently I never felt any sympathy (or even antipathy) toward any of them, so couldn't engage with any of the supposed crises they were experiencing.

Performances: almost uniformly muggy and overdone - an effect made even worse by the habit of shooting an awful lot of exchanges in tight close-up.

I was left with the feeling that this might just work on stage (where you'd lose all the tight close-up nonsense) as a short, one-act dark farce. Why on earth anyone thought it would succeed as a movie is beyond me.

Oh yes... I said "short", didn't I? When the end credits appeared there was an audible "Uh?" of surprise from the audience. Surely an entire movie hadn't passed already? On exiting the cinema I checked the time. The film had lasted barely over an hour. Mind you, on second thoughts this was probably a blessing: not sure I could have withstood another 30 minutes of such nonsense.

The middle-class dinner party in which the thin veneer of polite society is ripped away to expose the dog-eat-dog savagery underneath has provided ample fodder for playwrights since probably the birth of theatre, but films in which such a gathering is the sole focus are rarer. So step forward British auteur Sally Potter.

Having been appointed Shadow Minister for Health, Janet (Kristen Scott Thomas) and her husband Bill (Timothy Spall) throw a celebratory dinner party for their friends: the acerbic April (Patricia Clarkson) and (played by Bruno Ganz) her new age partner Gottfried ("prick an aromatherapist and you'll find a fascist" says April); lesbian professor Martha and her 'Masterchef' runner-up partner Jinny (Emily Mortimer), who is carrying their purchased foetuses ("babies are born every day, in large numbers - large enough to put our planet at risk" is April's unsentimental but accurate comment). Banker Tom (Cillian Murphy) arrives with his wife's apologies: she will be along later. Thus the stage is set, but when a champagne cork shatters a window it is an omen that this will be a dinner party none of the attendees will soon forget.

Trendy lefties who spend too much time thinking are an open goal when it comes to comedy, with their talk of 'post-post-feminism' and their professorships in Utopian Americanism, and Potter does not miss the target in her - I suspect affectionate - mickey-taking. There is nothing original in this - not even the 'twist' at the end - but the film is so entertaining that does not matter (with one exception: when banker Tom heads to the bathroom to snort cocaine I rolled my eyes - just once I would like to see a fictional young banker who *does not* have a coke habit: don't any of them simply put the kettle on?)

There is good acting all around: Clarkson gets all the best lines - albeit at the expense of depth of character - but that merely makes the others work harder with the lines they have been given. Thomas, whose character is the most fully-formed, is noteworthy.

At just over seventy minutes this is rather a short film. Quite why Potter decided to make it in black-and-white I do not know - extra filmsnob points I suppose. But it is hugely entertaining and I look forward to seeing it again. (After all, any film which lists in the credits 'production dog' *must* be good!)