Sally Potter's movie The Party: waspish, merciless and laced with absurdity
Bad dinner parties are a movie staple; nothing ramps up the interpersonal drama faster than putting a few fraying couples around a table groaning with Merlot and arming them with splades. It's not a sub-genre one might immediately associate with Sally Potter, who is most famous for directing Tilda Swinton in Orlando, but her new film The Party is a classic of the sub-genre: waspish, merciless and laced with absurdity. Potter has described it "an entertainment, in the Graham Greene sense of the word". She has even been merciless with herself, reining in the action to a brisk 71 minutes.
Potter occupies a curious place in the British film firmament. At 68, she is a veteran film-maker who started out at only 16 at the counter-cultural London Film-makers' Co-op in the 1960s. With only a couple of lapses, she has preserved her "outsider" status ever since. The critical and commercial success of her second feature Orlando (1990), based on the novel by Virginia Woolf, confounded her. "I had grown up in the avant-garde, shall we say," she told the Observer. "So suddenly to be No.1 at the box office pursued by agents, big boxes of fruit and bouquets arriving in hotels around the world, I didn't know what to do with myself."
Timothy Spall as Bill, a hillock of gloom in The Party.
So she went to Argentina to learn tango and make a film about it (The Tango Lesson, 1997), shot an entire film in iambic pentameter (Yes, 2004) and in between made a single studio film with Cate Blanchett and Johnny Depp, The Man Who Cried (2000), which convinced her to return to the margins and stay there; at least she could control her own work, even if she had to go into debt to do it. Even in obscurity, Potter is widely revered as a rare director still pushing film's boundaries. She may not even be especially marginal. As she said when The Party opened in London, more than 10,000 people had seen it at festivals; that would make it a best-seller if it were a literary novel. "And it's just beginning."
Everything in The Party takes place in four interlocking domestic spaces. Queening it in the kitchen is Janet (Kristin Scott Thomas), who has just been appointed shadow minister for health and is fielding congratulatory phone calls in between dolloping something into vol-au-vents. Her husband Bill (Timothy Spall) is a hillock of gloom in the middle of the loungeroom, drinking his way through a cellar while being lectured on how to improve himself by New Age life coach Gottfried (Bruno Ganz). Morose as he seems in the face of his alpha wife's ascendancy, Bill has a couple of crackers ready to set the party alight.
Kristin Scott Thomas as ascendant politcan Janet in director Sally Potter's movie The Party.
Meanwhile, the oleaginous Gottfried and April (Patricia Clarkson) are supposedly having their final night out as a couple. April is a rusty cynic who takes dry pleasure in telling her old friend Janet how pointless parliamentary politics are; it's a wonder she ever put up with gormless Gottfried. The other guests include the American Martha (Cherry Jones) and Jinny (Emily Mortimer), a lesbian couple expecting IVF triplet boys, and coked-up city banker Tom (Cillian Murphy)who believes his absent wife Marianne is having an affair. At least one other person in the room knows he's right.
Potter has said she began writing The Party "around the time of the election between David Cameron and Ed Miliband. A time when politics had all moved into the centre and nobody seemed to be telling the truth about anything." Then came the Brexit referendum, right in the middle of the two-week shoot. Scott Thomas remembers arriving for work the day after the vote. "We had a French sound recordist and his team; the cameraman was Russia; there was an Argentine set designer, Spanish people, Italians, all of us working on this tiny little film," she says. "People cried. It was really upsetting. The whole idea of a united Europe had just been smashed."
At that point, Clarkson says, the director wondered if she should rewrite some of the political arguments, then decided to press on. "She realised no, that is exactly what I wrote, this is it," Clarkson says; lying had become a central plank of public life. The political party in which Janet is such an inexorably rising star is never named, but these people clearly see themselves as progressive, principled and thoroughly pulled together. Under pressure, however, the layers of self-deceit painted over their lives' structural weaknesses start to crack. "So that feels like it's part of the way things are written about truth and post-truth," Potter says. "That wasn't there when I wrote it. But it has become that."
In some respects, however, The Party feels as if it could have sprung from another era. The action mounts to a frenzy in the manner of classic farce, with a lot of comic competition for the bathroom. The location in a couple of interlocking rooms hearkens back to chamber dramas such as Hitchcock's Rope. There are whiffs of Bunuel and couple storms like those in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, an association heightened by the fact that it's shot in black and white. "These people are so trapped and dour and dark in their own way," Clarkson says. "The only real colour comes from within and I think that is such a metaphor for the rest of the film."
Tilda Swinton in Sally Potter's breakout 1990 movie Orlando.
Scott Thomas was impressed by the way Potter used the camera to subdivide the small space. "You'll notice the camera is very close to the floor sometimes, which is very unflattering," she says. "You can't be a vain actress when you're working with Sally Potter – not in this film, anyway. But it creates [a result] that is very like a puppet show, with these huge, important shadows and this menacing atmosphere – it's a bit like [classic horror movie] Suspiria at some points."
Scott Thomas has said in the past that she felt she had played a great many melancholy or wistful women; she was thrilled to be asked to play a mover and shaker. Janet isn't based directly on anyone, she says. "But for the physicality of it we looked at a lot of people. She's very inspired by pictures in the newspapers where you see these harassed looking women who haven't had time to go to the hairdresser. The way we look at these women is so judgmental; it must be very tiresome." But doesn't she face the same thing? "Yes, but my job is image. It's a visual impression that I give; my ideas are coming through someone else's, projected through someone else's words, someone else's way of filming me."
Scott Thomas is 57. She is trying, against all the odds faced by any new director, to raise money to make her own film. Towards the end of The Party, Janet and April have a brief but intense exchange wondering whether they chose the right path in life. Whether they wasted their one shot. "You know, we're both middle-aged and this is it: this is the real thing, this is where we've got to. Taking measure of that. I found that incredibly moving to do." She thinks we can all identify with that anxiety; her own desire to direct reflects it. "It's a Janet and April thing: if you don't do it now, you're never going to do it. Or as Tim Spall's character Bill says, this is his life. He wants to live it."