The Party

The latest film from Sally Potter [Orlando (1992), The Man Who Cried (2000), Ginger & Rosa (2012)] is about as good as any movie with an unimaginative title like The Party can be. There have been a couple of movies with this moniker before—notably the 1968 Blake Edwards/Peter Sellers comedy (not a high point of their collaboration)—but literally hundreds of films could have settled for this name. Luis Buñuel’s could have called his surrealist masterpiece The Exterminating Angel something as blandly catchall as The Party, but fortunately he decided to spend a few minutes to think of something distinctive. 

The outright laziness of this title is sadly appropriate for Potter’s underdeveloped 71-minute trifle. Too bad, because she has assembled a first rate cast headed up by the always excellent Kristin Scott Thomas, who plays a British liberal politician throwing a dinner party to celebrate her appointment as Minister of Health. The dark humor of Potter’s screenplay sets out to skewer the hypocrisies of England’s privileged lefty bourgeois-bohemians, and she does get in a few good jabs. But the dialogue, relational dynamics, and narrative reveals are forced and predictable. The uninspired staging and flat digital monochrome photography doesn’t help matters. 

Granted, it’s fun watching these seven actors play together, even in something that feels more like a theater exercise or a home movie than a feature film. There’s nothing terrible about The Party; it just feels like the talented Potter wasted the opportunity to create something special.