The Party

 The Party is a filmed adaptation of what seems to be a stage play by the British playwright Sally Potter.  (She also directs.)  The piece is handsomely mounted with an all-star cast of British actors, shot in lustrous black and white to resemble the camera-work in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.  The famous film of Albee's play, featuring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, is obviously an influence on The Party; the movie resembles Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf in that the action takes place in real time in a single location and the characters are upper middle-class academics and, in The Party's case, political activists.  The subject matter is marital discord, adultery, and political strife.  The Party, like Albee's play, is a black comedy with the emotional and physical mayhem played for laughs.  At 71 minutes, Potter's piece is fierce, abbreviated, and cogent -- but it's so compressed that some parts don't make sense and the relationships between the characters seem a bit implausible.  The Party isn't wholly successful, but it's amusing, sardonic, and has a very clever twist at it ending.

Four couples have gathered to celebrate the election of their hostess, Janet, to a position as "shadow minister" of public health in the government.  Janet's husband, Bill, is a professor of some sort and clearly impaired in some mysterious way -- he doesn't speak, watches everyone with wounded eyes, and communicates by playing LPs from his huge collection for the guests. A lesbian couple are in attendance -- the older woman is a famous feminist academic; her partner is younger and pregnant with triplets, already determined to be boys.  Janet's best friend, April, has come to the gathering with her estranged boyfriend, Gottfried, a gentle, dimwitted New Age healer and "life coach."  Finally, Tom is present, however, without his wife, the beautiful Marianne, about whom everyone inquires  -- Marianne will, maybe, show up later, Tom says, for "dessert" or "coffee" at the end of the evening.  Although April supports Janet, she expresses disdain for the political system.  everyone else is, more or less, at odds; this is a dog-eat-dog gathering with all the characters sniping at one another.  Tom is some sort of high-finance shark; he's agitated, half-hysterical, and carrying a pistol.  Repeatedly, he adjourns to the toilet to sniff cocaine.  It appears that he is out-of-sorts because he has come to kill someone, likely Bill.  It turns out that Bill, the elderly demented-seeming professor has been carrying on a two-year plus love affair with Marianne.  This wounds and outrages Janet, the shadow minister, although her indignation is more than a little hypocritical -- while preparing the meal, she has been text messaging and calling a clandestine lover who remains off-screen throughout the film.  Janet punches Bill a couple times.  Then, the coke-addled Tom, made a cuckold by the elderly Bill, lunges at the old man and knocks him down, seemingly killing him.  Gottfried and Tom desperately try to revive the fallen Bill and put on music from Bill's record collection to bring him back to consciousness -- at one point, they play mournful baroque music, causing Gottfried to say:  "Maybe try another."  Bill sort of revives.  Everyone is gathered around him.  Then, the doorbell rings and there's a surprising, "trick" ending.  And, some pastry baked by Janet gets burned beyond recognition.

The short film features a tremendous cast.  Timothy Spall plays the disturbed Bill, a man in shock because he has just been told that he is terminally ill.  Bruno Ganz has the part of the earnest and annoying guru, Gottfried.  He keeps assuring Bill that Western medicine is voodoo and that he will be all right, a claim belied by poor Bill's gaunt and haggard appearance and staring eyes.  Janet professes that she will care for Bill to the bitter end, but, then, lectures him for "queue-jumping" (something that Brits hate) because he consulted with a physician who is not part of the National Health Service, that is, the agency within her portfolio.  It turns out that Bill, as a young man, apparently had a sexual affair with the austere and radical lesbian academic -- this revelation leads to a crisis in the relationship between the older woman and her pregnant spouse.  Cillian Murphy acts the role of agitated and frantic Tom, a "wolf of Wall Street" caricature. All the performers are excellent and there are elements of British farce in the way that the characters ricochet off one another in the claustrophobic townhouse. The show is so compressed and the characters so bitchy that it's hard to for viewers to get their footing.  The film is over before it seems to have begun.  There's nothing great about this picture, but it's beautifully mounted with memorable acting and a highly intelligent script, although events are so calamitous that the movie has a rushed, panic-stricken and desperate aspect to it.  (I thought that this was the great Bruno Ganz' last picture, but the Austrian actor was nothing if not industrious, he made 6 more pictures after the 2017 The Party before dying in 2019.)