Movie Review of “The
Party”
he
funniest scene in “The
Party” (1968) comes
right at the beginning. Peter Sellers is an army scout,
a loyal Indian from the same mold as Gunga Din. He is
about to warn the British troops of an ambush by Indian
mutineers. He is wounded but manages to stand up and
deliver the warning on his bugle. The British troops
scatter. The mutineers turn their aim on the scout. He
is hit again, but rises to repeat the warning, the
bugle notes wavering pathetically. Again he is shot and
again he struggles to his feet. And again. And again.
And again. At this point, the entire firepower of the
mutineers is turned on this one brave soul: rifles,
canon, Gattling guns, everything. He is indestructible.
We can feel a certain frustration mounting. Finally we
hear “Cut!” and the camera pulls back to
reveal a film crew shooting the big final battle scene
of what was to be a drama but has now become a farce.
Sellers plays Indian
bit-actor, Hrundi V. Bakshi, a loser, a klutz who goes
around ruining everything he touches. Through some
clerical foul-up he is invited to a dinner party thrown
by the mogul/producer whose film he has just ruined,
and he proceeds to ruin the party as well. However, we
gradually realize that, while he has ruined the staid
dinner party that had been planned, he has transformed
it into an uncontrollable
Bacchanalian feast that lasts all
night and changes all those who let its spirit enter
into them.
This includes Bakshi
himself. We come to see him not so much as a loser as
an outsider. He is the yeast that gets into things,
that throws the dull flour-and-water of society into a
turmoil which may provide true nourishment for the
soul. (We should bear in mind that, like Bakshi, the
yeast has no such grand ambitions. It’s just
trying to eat. The waste by-products of that meal, the
gas and liquid it excretes, are carbon dioxide and
alcohol. Moral: one man’s piss is another
man’s ambrosia.)
Baskshi’s
transformation hinges on two acts of self-assertion.
The first occurs when he stares down the director of
the just-finished picture, who is there with a lovely
young French woman, Michele (played by the lovely
Claudine Longet). The second occurs when he insists
that a baby elephant brought to the party as a joke by
some local college students who’ve painted
humorous slogans all over it be washed off, that this
insult (to an animal of nobility in his own culture) be
removed.
In these scenes, the
Indian removes his disguise of Loser and stand revealed
as The Fool, just as the elephant removes its disguise
of fraternity joke and stands revealed as Ganesha, the
elephant-headed son of Shiva, the Destroyer, (one of
the three aspects of the Hindu Godhead).
The soap used to
clean the elephant gives off an absurd amount of suds
(as yeast does in the fermenting process) and these
move through the house like a gentle juggernaut,
devastating all pretense and sterility in their path,
but lubricating the real party that is starting to take
over. Like the yeast, whose effect is out of all
proportion to its size, the soap acts as a catalyst
– just like Bakshi, whose effect on his
surroundings is out of all proportion to his social and
artistic stature.
But Bakshi
doesn’t accomplish these things all by himself.
He receives crucial help from two women. One is
Michele, who takes a liking to this strange Indian and
makes the first move. The other is the daughter of the
hostess, who arrives with the fraternity crowd but who
becomes sympathetic to his demand that the
elephant’s dignity be restored. It is the love of
an honest woman – or two – that makes a man
of Bakshi.
The ending of the
movie reminds us that comic resolutions come in a
rainbow of intensities. The median is found in that
classic happy ending: a marriage. One couple escapes
from bondage and absurdity and finds true life. Towards
one end of the spectrum we find more and more couples
getting swept up in the excitement until, at its
farthest extremity, we see the rebirth of a whole
society, the dawning of a golden age. Towards the other
end of the spectrum, the resolutions are more
tentative. At the end of “The Party,” when
Bakshi drives Michele home, there are no wedding bells,
no passionate speeches, not even a goodnight kiss, just
the understanding that they will see each other again
at some point. The sun has not burst onto the scene,
but the blackness of night is thinning out a little.
The restraint of Bakshi reverses the fanatical lack of
proportion that he displayed in its first scene.
The score by Henry
Mancini provides some of the keenest pleasure of this
film (which was written and directed by Blake Edwards,
one of the great comedy directors of the 60s and 70s).
The song at the end of the movie, reprising a version
we hear earlier, is hauntingly beautiful and
bittersweet. It flooded me with a sharp nostalgia for
the yeasty days of my own youth.
