The Party – first look review | Little White Lies

Festivals

The Par­ty – first look review

14 Feb 2017

Words by Adam Lee Davies

Greying, bearded man intently listening to vinyl record, glass of red wine nearby
Greying, bearded man intently listening to vinyl record, glass of red wine nearby
Pseu­do-intel­lec­tu­al pon­tif­i­cat­ing abounds in Sal­ly Potter’s brisk mid­dle class comedy.

There was a 7030 split among the Berli­nale crowd for Sal­ly Potter’s lat­est. Big laughs from effort­less­ly-amused swathes of the crowd were coun­tered by icy pock­ets com­bat­ive silence from those unmoved by its would-be wit­ti­cisms. Is it, as the chortling mass­es would sug­gest, a nim­ble, rapi­er-sharp sketch of infi­deli­ty, worn-out ide­al­ism and the absur­di­ty of mor­tal­i­ty that’s chock-full of relat­able char­ac­ters and acid-tongued zingers? Or is it a provin­cial am-dram table read of an espe­cial­ly pleased-with-itself Frasi­er episode that nev­er made it past the script stage? (Clue: it’s the Frasi­er one.)

The scene: an upper mid­dle class house in, say, Hamp­stead. Tim­o­thy Spall is sit­ting in the lounge slurp­ing red wine and star­ing bleak­ly into space. His wife, Kristin Scott Thomas, is in the kitchen prepar­ing for a small gath­er­ing to cel­e­brate her immi­nent polit­i­cal pro­mo­tion. Enter the guests: the les­bian cou­ple with big news of their own; Frasi­er alum Patri­cia Clark­son as an improb­a­bly cat­ty side­kick in the process of split­ting up with Com­e­dy Ger­man Aro­mather­a­pist Bruno Ganz; and a chalked-up Cil­lian Mur­phy with a gun. All the ele­ments for a breezy (or bloody) French win­dow farce are in place, but once the tired quips start fly­ing and the hith­er­to-unspo­ken truths start pil­ing up, it’s clear that the script has noth­ing to say and a very awk­ward way of say­ing it.

Wooly intel­lec­tu­al pon­tif­i­ca­tions – on the NHS, arti­fi­cial insem­i­na­tion, Denis Thatch­er – spurt ran­dom­ly forth from char­ac­ters’ mouths only to drib­ble away to noth­ing or be sliced down to size by one of Clarkson’s end­less fund of hacky put downs. Huge rev­e­la­tions are aban­doned after only the most cur­so­ry explo­ration of their impact. Cil­lian Mur­phy is in his own movie entire­ly. The plot itself is swell enough, with a nifty Twi­light Zone twist in the tail and, to be fair, things do pick up toward the home stretch, but there’s just so much smug, addled, mis­fir­ing filler that the film has long-since hob­bled itself and the whole thing seems a good deal longer than its brisk 71 min­utes runtime.

It’s also, for some rea­son, shot in black-and-white.

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