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The Party review: Kristin Scott Thomas stars in a spirited Brexit-era comedy

Timothy Spall, Cillian Murphy, Emily Mortimer and Patricia Clarkson in The Party
Timothy Spall, Cillian Murphy, Emily Mortimer and Patricia Clarkson in The Party

Dir: Sally Potter. Cast: Kristin Scott Thomas, Patricia Clarkson, Timothy Spall, Cillian Murphy, Emily Mortimer, Bruno Ganz, Cherry Jones. 71 mins; 15 cert

“Sally Potter” and “big laughs” are not traditionally concepts that go hand in hand, but there’s a steady stream of them in The Party, the British director’s one-location, state-of-the-nation comedy about acrimony flying at a middle-class London gathering.

Shot in beady black-and-white and barely over an hour long, this Berlin Film Festival premiere isn’t major Potter – you have to go back a ways for that. But it has a vigorous sense of entertainment value and a cast relishing every moment.

Kristin Scott Thomas hosts the whole shindig as Janet, who has just been appointed Shadow Health Minister and receives a half-dozen guests to celebrate over dinner.

Her husband Bill (Timothy Spall) sits catatonically waiting to receive them all, and turns out to have news of his own, about a medical diagnosis, which twists the whole evening in a more morbid direction.

Spall’s handog mopiness becomes a better punchline the longer the film goes on: he’s a good sport for overdoing it this ripely in Potter’s frequent close-ups, almost as if asked to turn his best Mike Leigh Face up to 11 for a party trick.

Everyone who comes is isolated in their own preoccupations by the shooting style, especially Tom (Cillian Murphy), a slick but jittery banker friend who immediately dives into the loo to snort coke, and turns out to be concealing a gun, for vengeful purposes, in the inside pocket of his natty suit.

It’s the same weapon we see in the very first shot, as Janet opens the front door to point it at an unseen guest – the very last, it transpires – in a framing device that doesn’t quite earn its keep.

When The Party is on, it’s on. Patricia Clarkson serenely walks off with the whole thing as April, a catty confidante who can’t drop a compliment without a concealed insult in there somewhere, and has no time at all for her husband, Gottfried (Bruno Ganz) – regularly ordering the other guests to ignore his woolly blatherings about karma and alternative medicine. “Tickle an aromatherapist and you find a fascist,” she sighs in his direction at one point, showing every indication of having empirically proved this more than once.

Potter’s script is both more and less than the sum of its bon mots. There’s ambition here to grapple with Britain’s political faultlines in the Brexit era, and also take the temperature of feminist thought in 2017, but the exercise only lightly toys with these apparent goals – it’s simply too silly, if knowingly and sometimes refreshingly so.

The 75 best British films of all time
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The lesbian couple played by Emily Mortimer and Cherry Jones, who are expecting triplets, are weak links in characterisation terms, and inserting their situation into a debate of private-vs-public health provision feels pat. The twist, involving multiple infidelities, is a bit of a groaner.

Still, no one could fail to get enjoyment out of Clarkson’s majestic eye-rolling all the way through, an absolute humdinger of a line about Janet’s personal styling, or indeed the excellent scene when Spall lies prone and injured on the carpet, while wholly inappropriate LPs are stuck on to rescue the mood. The Party is out like a light – you certainly couldn’t accuse it of overstaying its welcome. And its welcome is spirited and surprising.