The Party | Little White Lies

The Par­ty

13 Oct 2017 / Released: 13 Oct 2017

Greyscale portrait of a woman with long, wavy hair, wearing a white blouse, standing in front of a patterned backdrop.
Greyscale portrait of a woman with long, wavy hair, wearing a white blouse, standing in front of a patterned backdrop.
2

Anticipation.

Fine cast! Seventy-one minutes? Black and white...

2

Enjoyment.

A claret catastrophe of upper middle class navel gazing and hackneyed barbs.

1

In Retrospect.

Corbyn is playing dress-up in No 10. Thatcher masturbates in her grave. Anyone earning less that a six-figure income can just fuck off.

Wool­ly dia­logue under­mines a strong cast and intrigu­ing plot in Sal­ly Potter’s drab drama.

There was a 7030 split among the crowd at the Berli­nale pre­mière of 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. 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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