Janet has just been appointed Minister of Health, the culmination of an entire career. She gathers a few close friends with her husband Bill. But the party takes an unexpected turn.
It’s short, it’s lively, it’s irreverent, it’s English.
In her beautiful apartment, Janet (Kristin Scott Thomas) busies herself for the small gathering of friends meant to celebrate the most important day of her life. She has just been appointed Minister of Health and congratulatory calls are pouring in, including one from a man who is clearly smitten.
Not far away, Bill (Timothy Spall), her husband with bewildered eyes, is drinking while listening to rock and jazz from his youth on his old turntable. April (Patricia Clarkson), Janet’s best friend, arrives with an acquaintance, a German life coach; two lesbians, one of whom is expecting triplets; and a handsome, hysterical young man, nose in the coke, armed with a revolver…
But there is a shadow marked by its absence, a woman everyone will mention, but whom the audience will never see, a marvel whom her young husband wants to hold onto at all costs and her old lover wants to keep at any price: Marianne the magnificent, Marianne the enchantress…
From Mankiewicz, Sally Potter (Orlando in 1992, Ginger and Rosa in 2013) has also retained the devastating force of the narrative: “pre-Brexit” Labour England is as fiercely caricatured as America in A Wedding in Boston, once was. And the venomous smoothness of the dialogues, superbly written, reveals in a few strokes what each character carefully wishes to hide.
It is when they break free from the constraints of their social class—when fury truly takes hold—that Sally Potter’s very British zombies come back to life, with their anxieties, disillusionments, and resentments.
Faced with the successive revelations her husband makes, Kristin Scott Thomas (dazzling) slaps him, runs to curl up on a sofa while comically denying her action, then suddenly—as if freed and finally becoming herself again—lunges to slap him once more. Violently, this time. With enthusiasm. Even with voluptuousness…
There are seven of them. Plus one object that becomes the eighth character of this amusing closed-door affair: the revolver brought by the husband of the beautiful Marianne, which Kristin Scott Thomas retrieves for a mocking finale that urges viewers to immediately rewatch this Party, to fully grasp its ambiguity and irony.
