In Antony Cordier’s The Party’s Over! (Class Moyenne), a conflict is brewing between the Trousselards, a family fronted by a rich breadwinner whose wife and daughter are former and future professional actresses, and the Azizis, who have the same dynamic of a married couple/daughter and have been caretakers of the Trousselards’ summer villa these past seven years. Although the relationship is cordial and even familial in its way – the daughters were fast friends as teenagers – there’s a resentment simmering on the part of the caretakers, who are regularly treated with the sort of benign disregard wealthy people show toward those in their employ. So one day, they push back.
The Azizis’ rebellion, which might have continued simmering if not for an incident where the paterfamilias got black-out drunk, initially strikes us as false. Why would these three lash out at the wealthy family, when their livelihood depends on the villa’s owners, and when the Trousselards’ trespasses are best described as a lack of consideration?
Aye, but here’s where Cordier and his co-writers, Jean-Alain Laban and Steven Mitz, are playing on our preconceived notions of such a scenario, based on the way we’re told people should get what they get and not get upset. Their satire of class relations is fuelled by such grievances that rarely get spoken, and The Party’s Over! imagines, over the course of 90 minutes, what will happen if they do.
The French title of this film translates to “middle class,” and in fact, it might be talking about a class that exists in between these two families, even if, in most respects, the Azizis are proper occupants of that stratum. Then again, “middle class” is also an insult that places a quality judgment on their behaviour, which falls equally on both sides.
Philippe Trousselard (Laurent Lafitte) and his wife Laurence (Elodie Bouchez), a high-powered lawyer and a former actress famous for showing off her flesh, are at their summer villa with a special guest this time. Their daughter Garance (Noee Abita) has brought along the young man she’s dating, Mehdi (Sami Outalbali), who is setting out in a career in law, just like her father. Their conflict with their caretakers is set in motion by a clogged kitchen sink.
So Philippe and Mehdi walk the short path down to see Tony (Ramzy Bedia), Nadine (Laure Calamy) and Marylou (Mahia Zrouki), who, it so happens, are just celebrating Marylou’s 20th birthday. It’s a Sunday, their day off, so the intrusion is questionable to begin with. But Philippe misses the opportunity to depart gracefully after clocking the situation, instead suspecting that the clearing of the drain will only take five minutes, and not put out his employee unduly. When Tony gets a face full of shit that ruins his new shirt, it opens a box that can’t be closed.
After a drunken rant that includes ruining Philippe’s prized dinner dish, and reveals Tony’s true feelings toward his employers, a beef escalates between the two families just down the path from each other. The Trousellards could just sack the Azizis, but the latter have got ammunition on their side: years worth of pay below minimum wage, and a booklet of receipts that will prove it. Each can make the other’s lives a living hell, and set out to do so until the other capitulates.
There’s a minor variation on Parasite at play here, and for a while it shows a fair amount of promise. Cordier is careful not to suggest that either side is blameless, though we suspect he’d support the Azizis sooner than he’d support the Trousselards. Still, it’s also clear that the Azizis have been guilty of some overreactions, not to mention some shady tactics of their own once the battle is really underway.
What’s missing from The Party’s Over! is more of a commitment to a certain level of absurdity. We know the French are capable of playing a farce at full volume, but this one gets caught in more of a middle space – or “moyenne,” to use the word from the French title.
The most effective way to pace such a conflict is to steadily build it using mutual microaggressions that gradually become intolerable, until they burst forth into the sort of orgy of slapstick violence in which we’ll believe any recourse that’s taken by either party, in the context of what the film is presenting to us. The Party’s Over! reaches its crisis point too early in the narrative, based on too little evidence, and then spends a long stretch on mid-level warfare that never makes us squeal with glee. Momentum is important in a narrative like this, and The Party’s Over! doesn’t have it.
It does, however, have some compelling and sneaky observations about the racial component in all this. The x factor in this conflict is Garance’s boyfriend, Mehdi, who has a similar ethnic upbringing as Tony. When he’s tasked with the responsibility of negotiating peace, the film questions where his loyalties lie. Will he support his girlfriend’s father, the sort of man who looks down his nose at Mehdi but can also help get him the proper law internship, or will he support a man with a similar cultural background, with whom he shares a victimhood at the hands of people like his girlfriend’s father?
It isn’t a simple answer, and the way Mehdi plays into the resolution of the film is one of its most bold strokes. The Party’s Over! concludes on a note of cynicism, which is the only way for such a conflict to conclude. The whole experience might have been more memorable if this cynicism were preceded by the kind of gleeful chaos the movie set out to give us, at least according to the English title they’ve chosen for it, with a more consistent tonal approach. Where’s the exclamation point from that English title? Moyenne is more mid than you’d want.
The Party’s Over! opens tomorrow in Australian cinemas.