Brexit satire draws laughs at BIFF – Potter takes ‘loving look’ at ‘broken England’

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BERLIN, Feb 14, (Agencies): An uproarious British satire shot during the Brexit referendum drew big laughs at the Berlin Film Festival Monday, with Sally Potter using a stellar cast for “a light and loving look” at a “broken England”.

In “The Party”, shot entirely in black and white, Kristin Scott Thomas plays Janet, a British MP who has just become health minister and throws an intimate soiree with her husband (Timothy Spall) and closest friends to celebrate.

Her clique is a well-heeled international set including April, an acerbic American (Patricia Clarkson) living in London who declares parliamentary politics to be “finished” but nevertheless believes the new minister can “save our country from profiteering butchery”.

Her German lover (Bruno Ganz) is a “life coach and healer” who dismisses Western medicine as “voodoo”.

Another friend of the family is an agitated City “wanker banker” from Ireland (Cillian Murphy) who slips away to the toilet as soon as he arrives to snort cocaine and fiddle with the handgun he has hidden in his jacket.

Finally a couple, separated in age by two decades, arrives with the younger partner (Emily Mortimer) announcing that she is pregnant with male triplets.

In the course of a little more than a whirlwind hour, secrets and lies are exposed, marriages and lives shattered and careers left teetering on the brink.

Potter told reporters after a press preview that drew warm applause that she had started writing the screenplay during the 2015 British general election but didn’t shoot it until the week before and after the Brexit vote.

“Things have become polarised since I first started writing but what was central to it was the feeling that people were losing faith in political life, losing the ability to even know what the truth was”, she said.

“That’s why truth-telling is so central to the politics in this story, all kinds of truth-telling in personal life and in political life”.

Asked about the cosmopolitan cast and crew, Potter said it was clear that the themes of disaffection and a loss of faith in public officials resonated far beyond Britain.

“I wanted a feeling on both sides of the camera of internationalism — the opposite of the dynamic of Brexit, by the way”, she said. “And Trump”, Clarkson added.

Connecting

Janet, as an ambitious, highly competent middle-aged blonde politician with trouble connecting with voters and a cheating husband named Bill, seems tragically, comically doomed.

April advises her during one scene: “If you’re going to lead this country, and you must”, she says, “you’re going to have to change your hair”.

Potter is best known for films such as “Orlando” and “Ginger & Rosa” as well as being a sought-after opera director.

She said that while she was pessimistic about the impact of Brexit, despair wasn’t the answer.

“Sometimes the most positive thing to do is to look bad stuff in the face and laugh about it”, she said.

“The Party” is one of 18 movies vying for the festival’s Golden Bear top prize, to be awarded Saturday.

Potter is one of four female directors in the competition.

Kristin Scott Thomas, Timothy Spall, Patricia Clarkson, Bruno Ganz and Cillian Murphy star in the film, which revolves around a house party to celebrate the appointment Scott Thomas’s character Janet as a minister in Britain’s shadow cabinet — only for chaos to ensue.

Potter told reporters at the Berlin Film Festival that she wrote the dialogue to focus on “what people don’t say or feel they can’t say”, while the film’s black-and-white palette offered “an incredible space for emotional color — the magic that the brain can see things in different ways, in this abstract world of light and dark. Many of my favorite films are in black and white, and I’d like to think it’s in that lineage”.

On working with her high-caliber cast, Potter said it was about “loving and caring for what they do, teasing it out of them to go in the direction I want to go but also respecting where they want to go. It’s the magic of collaboration”.

Clarkson added: “The camaraderie we had carried us through the wickedness of these characters. We enjoyed a great deal of humor among ourselves; we really fell in love with one another. It was a real privilege”.

Asked whom he preferred, Harry Potter or Sally Potter, Spall replied: “Without denigrating H. Potter, S. Potter is always more preferable. Collaborating, working with someone you admire, someone whose work is always changing, is wonderful. All of Sally’s films are so incredibly different. It’s a real joy. Without putting on any pretentious color, it is very artistic work – definitely Sally Potter all the way”.

Scott Thomas echoed the sentiment, but added that the initial challenge of the film caused some nervousness. “It was like doing a play. There was panic knowing that we only had two weeks to shoot it and no time for multiple takes. But it was one of most memorable filming experiences I’ve ever had”.

Murphy was likewise thrilled with the project. “It was great fun. I was really attracted by the deliberate misdirection of the script. He [Murphy’s character, Tom] doesn’t look mentally well. For any actor, to start a part in one place and then end up somewhere completely different is really wonderful. That really appealed to me.

“When I saw the cast that Sally had gathered, it was obviously a no-brainer”, Murphy added. “I’ve watched and have been a fan of these people since I was very young. You’re always learning as an actor, it never stops, and it was a real joy to watch these actors work”.

Ganz, who plays Gottfried, an esoteric German yoga aficionado, said the film was a chance to “make Madame Merkel happy by playing a good German in a film”, the Swiss actor deadpanned.

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