The Party ( Sally Potter, 2018): USA

Reviewed by Keyu Zhu. Viewed at the Santa Barbara Film Festival, 2018.

The Party is the latest Comedy/Drama made by Sally Potter, she is also the director known by The Tango Lesson and Orlando. The movie is produced by the Adventure Pictures. It is going to release on February 16th in the United States. The movie is basically about a female politician Janet and her husband Bill invited guests including April, Gottfried, Tom and Jinny to her house located in London to celebrate her promotion. At first everybody started to praise Janet but soon it became argument and even fight before the dinner is served, the house became a warzone. After saving her husband’s life, Janet seems to be better and more conscious about the reality, but things always badly happened. At the end of the film, Janet pulled up the gun she got it from one of the guests and shot one of the guests of today.

The movie is an amazing experimental movie, it focus on the important issues such as love, marriage and politics. Those are very deep topic issues. The British director Sally Potter did a great job here. The theme of this movie is both dark and hurmous at the same time. It was funny but if you look deeply through it, it was really crucial and uncontrollably true. The love finally became the hate and all the patience and mercy are gone. Maybe Tom shouldn’t do a so much cocaine, maybe Jinny should be told that she is pregnant. Maybe Jannet could be more patient and compassionate. However, what happened just happened and it became unstoppable. A lot of confusions and people just got unconscious because they didn’t know what they are doing and they didn’t know what they are talking about. The fight between them reveal the topic of this movie, which is a black comedy.

The narrative of this film is good, the structure is professional and the best and the most important setting here is the cinematography. The cinematographer is the Aleksei Roclinov who is from Russia. The film is black and white screened, just like its theme. And this setting make the film seem more historical and mysterious. The genre of this movie is comedy and drama. The narration of this film mainly about how the mind shifting of the main character Jannet who pulled up the gun and shoot one of the guests, and the movie just stopped so we might not know if the main character killed all the guests or just didn’t do anything, it is the good spot that let the movie stop.The movie is related to another talking and argument movie. Also, the background music is very used, including Jazz, Piano.

I personally really like this film because it doesn’t look like the mainstream Hollywood film, it is more stylistic and very distinctive. I think the movie could be more conflicts between each other and the scripts should be more mature.


About this entry