Let’s get The Party started

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This article was published 02/03/2018 (3131 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

More than the vol au vents get ruined in this short and sharp social satire, a notable new entry in the “dinner party from hell” genre.

British filmmaker Sally Potter (Ginger & Rosa, Orlando), generally known for her serious experimental work, has some vicious fun with her ill-assorted guests. The Party is like a drawing-room comedy on bad acid. Filmed in good-looking black-and-white, it’s brisk and self-contained, not particularly deep but frequently very funny.

Kristin Scott Thomas (The English Patient) plays Janet, who is throwing a dinner to celebrate her political appointment as shadow health minister. The London home she shares with her husband, Bill (Mr. Turner’s Timothy Spall), a preoccupied-looking academic, is filled with books, music and elegantly shabby furniture — all the markers of middle-aged, middle-class left-wing English intellectuals.

Of course, given the genre — and the fact that the very first scene introduces a Chekhovian gun that will spend the rest of the 71-minute film just waiting to go off — we know that the taken-for-granted comforts of this bourgeois setting are about to be blown up.

Potter just starts right in by revealing an imminent marital separation, an ongoing affair, a terminal illness and a surprise birth announcement. (These aren’t really spoilers, by the way, since Potter piles this all into the first few minutes.)

Bill is thought to be the perfect supportive husband, but he doesn’t seem thrilled by Janet’s success. He introduces himself to one guest by saying, “I’m Bill… or I used to be.”

Janet’s cynical friend April (Patricia Clarkson of House of Cards) is — maybe? — a bit happier. “I’m proud of you,” she tells Janet, “even though I think democracy is finished.”

April has a way with savage one-liners, which are often directed at her ill-matched romantic partner, Gottfried (Downfall’s Bruno Ganz), who uses his vague New Age spirituality to float serenely — or is it slyly? — over the fray.

Cherry Jones (Transparent) and Emily Mortimer (The Newsroom) are Martha and Jinny, recently married and coming to terms with a new pregnancy, while Cillian Murphy (Peaky Blinders) is Tom, a coked-up investment banker who’s brought the aforementioned gun but mysteriously left his wife at home.

This is not one of those films where the surfaces of civilized behaviour gradually fall away to reveal the chaos underneath. With breakneck pacing and absurdist plotting, The Party starts out in full chaos and then proceeds to add even more complications. Just assume that everyone is going to engage in intimate knock-down fights in public and nobody is going to do the obvious or sensible thing, like, you know, leave early.

There’s a lot of chatter about life and death, love and betrayal, gender dynamics and sexual politics, youthful idealism and middle-aged compromise, rationalism and mysticism. Potter doesn’t dive deep into any of these issues, but she pulls off some smart surface observations, particularly on the sometimes tricky overlap between progressive politics and economic privilege.

Nobody wants to listen when Tom, “the wanker banker,” as April calls him, tells the other guests they’re not as uninterested in money as they claim.

Anchored by Scott Thomas’s portrayal of cool competence and boosted by Clarkson’s magnificently crisp zingers, the ensemble cast is tight and terrific. They don’t do much emotional heavy lifting, however.

The Party remains fast, brittle and more than a bit mean, and you’ll probably either love it or hate it. Some viewers will be put off by the sudden surprise ending — and by that I mean the last 15 seconds, which drop yet another twist into an already twisty plot.

If, however, you’re inclined to find some cruel human comedy in Judith talking about her earnest belief in “truth and reconciliation” just before she tries to punch someone in the face, you should probably RSVP.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca