The Party

The first two notes set the tone. A discordant reprise of “Jerusalem,” the hymn that accompanies so many screen exposures of British culture, alerts us to the social satire to follow. 

  The visual narrative starts and ends on the same shot. In black and white, the raging harridan Janet aims a gun at the audience. The violence and classic black and white evoke two cinematic contexts, the classic monster movie and British social realism of the 60s. There be monsters here. 

The title points two ways. Most obviously, Janet and Bill are throwing a dinner party to celebrate her appointment as Labour shadow minister of Health (always a harbinger of disease, social or psychological). Also, the friends and the celebration are rooted in the Labour party, which April declares “your entirely rotten and useless opposition party.” 

She, a cynical American, trusts direct and violent action over parliamentary democracy. Her boyfriend Gottfried mouths New Age cliches — “Western medicine is voodoo.… Change is good.” — that infuriate her, to the point she declares “This is our last supper.””

Another friend — “wanker banker” Tom — works in a Tory profession. He is a coke-head wreck not just because his wife is leaving him but because he still carries some recidivist Leftism: “No money is clean. It all comes through the system and into your pockets. Your grubby little pockets!” He brings a gun to the party.

But the group as a whole shares a liberal politic as rooted — and as brittle — as their current relationships. 

Whether we take “party” in the social or political sense, the drama is the same: a close-knit group disintegrates from its betrayals, infidelities, and faltering sensitivity to each other.  The lesbian couple is similarly shaken when Martha’s uncovered past disturbs Jinny and Martha draws back from the triplets Jinny is carrying for them.  

The film bristles with a whip-smart, black comic script. Yet the two central figures don’t say much. Janet’s long-supportive professor husband Bill stares in a drunken stupor until he’s knocked unconscious — which hardly alters his expression. In a prophetic early line, he says “Yes, yes, and I'm Bill, I think. Well, I used to be.” By film’s end nobody will be what they assumed they were. 

The film’s most pervasive force is the character we don’t see — Maryanne, who’s Tom’s wife and the two-edged sword that cleaves Janet’s marriage — and probably career, if she pulls that trigger.  

  April in particular blows through the dialogue like an acrid spring breeze. She dismisses her husband with "Prick an aromatherapist and you'll find a fascist” — though he’s far from his Nazi forbears. April deflates feminine sentimentality: “Babies, excuse me Jinny, Martha, babies get born every day in extremely large numbers to the point of endangering the planet and all our futures.” But she still punctuates the heaviest concerns with a dash of formulaic political advice: “You’ll have to do something about your hair.” She dismisses Martha as “a first class lesbian and a second rate thinker. Must be all those Women's Studies.” Martha admits to “Specializing in domestic labour gender differentiation in American utopianism.”
     No Utopianism in this film’s England, though. Just avatars of contemporary culture discovering each others’ vulnerabilities as their world crumbles around them. One bright spot, though: April may keep Gottfried, for as she sees the other relationships theirs suddenly seems relatively healthy.