The Party: Nature Morte (1991)

Cynthia Beatt is a Jamaican-born English filmmaker. She studied at Bath Academy of Art in the early 1970s and relocated to Berlin in 1975 where, working outside commercial cinema, she has collaborated with many other filmmakers as well as creating her own work. She has made several films with Tilda Swinton including The Party: Nature Morte in which Swinton plays Queenie, a flamboyant woman whose marriage to her German husband is failing. She navigates this personal crisis by throwing an all-night party for friends, during which she does little to improve her marital situation by flirting with an alluring Frenchman named Black.

Shot in steely monochrome, and reminiscent of Weimar-era cinema, the film is structured as a flow of vignettes, with an ever-changing cast of party guests. Dozens of people get their minute or two of prominence, but everything turns around the central triangle of wife, husband and potential lover. Stylishly belying the fact it was filmed in 15 days on a micro-budget shortly after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall (the Wall itself being the subject of two other films by Beatt, both starring Tilda Swinton), The Party: Nature Morte is compassionate, poetic and far from bleak.

Part of Cinema Rediscovered on Tour.