The Party (2017)

Sally Potter's The Party arrives as a black and white chamber piece, seven actors in a London townhouse, ninety minutes of escalating catastrophe. Janet, a freshly appointed shadow health minister, has gathered her circle for canapes and congratulations. Her husband Bill sits in a chair, drinking, saying nothing. The guests include a women's studies professor, her pregnant chef partner, a self-styled spiritual healer, and a banker who spends the first act locked in a bathroom with cocaine and a handgun. It is a farce, tightly wound, and the doors keep opening onto worse news.

On the question of gender, the film has genuine interests. Potter directs, Kristin Scott Thomas anchors the frame as a woman navigating the compromises of political office, and the Martha and Jinny thread gives us a married lesbian couple whose parenting conflict carries real dramatic weight. Martha condescends, Jinny bristles, and the argument about who will raise the triplets lands with a sting. This is not decoration. It is structure. The film is less interested in race or class beyond the drawing room, and its concerns remain those of a comfortable, well-read, entirely white milieu.

Where the film resists sermonizing is in its delivery. Tom the financier gets his comeuppance as a snorting, gun-waving opportunist, a mild jab at the City that never hardens into an argument. The politics are debated, mocked, absorbed into the farce. A gun ends up in a bin, then in a bathroom, then in Janet's hand at the door. The final image is a woman aiming at a betrayer and screaming, which is a more honest ending than any lecture could manage.