Berlin Film Festival, 2017: The Party, review – Skewering of the chattering classes

This stingingly funny short comedy from Sally Potter is a chamber piece, but one with resonance, says David Sexton
Magisterial: Timothy Spall
Oxwich Media Limited/ Adventure Pictures Limited
David Sexton22 November 2017

Here’s a surprise at the Berlin film festival: a stingingly funny short comedy from Sally Potter (Orlando, Ginger & Rosa).

Set in a London house, taking place in real time, filmed in black and white, The Party is a chamber piece but one with resonance, “absolutely a political statement”, a portrait of “broken England”, Potter says.

Ambitious Janet (Kristin Scott Thomas) has just been made shadow minister of health and friends are coming round to celebrate. From her surreptitious mobile calls, it’s clear she has a secret lover — and, rapidly, we realise that this whole milieu of educated, liberal people is actually a viper’s pit of lies and deception.

Janet’s cynical friend April (Patricia Clarkson) states it’s her last supper with her ill-sorted, woo-woo life-coach boyfriend Gottfried (Bruno Ganz, no less) but that’s the least of it. Lesbian couple Martha (Cherry Jones) and Jinny (Emily Mortimer) have news of their own — thanks to IVF, they are having triplets, three boys, “almost a football team”, says Martha, repelled.

Janet’s apparently ever loyal husband Billy (Timothy Spall, magisterial) sits there, drinking and looking catatonically stricken: he announces he has been diagnosed, privately, with terminal cancer, and is leaving her for whatever time he has left. Janet furiously assaults him, while protesting she believes in “truth and reconciliation”. Meanwhile, sharp-suited but coked-up and off-his-head banker Tom (Cillian Murphy) has come to the party with a gun...

Conceived during the 2015 election, filmed over a fortnight during the Brexit referendum, The Party eviscerates a political class that has lost its way. It’s like nothing so much as a really great Simon Gray play from beyond the grave.

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