Alliance Française French Film Festival entry The Party’s Over! or Classe Moyenne is directed by Antony Cordier and stars Sami Outalbali, Noée Abita, Laure Calamy, Laurent Lafitte, Élodie Bouchez and Ramzy Bedia. One for movie buffs fond of Parasite, The Menu, and Triangle of Sadness.
We witness a war between two classes: the wealthy, heartless Trousselards and the caretakers of their summer house, the Azizis.
An outsider to wealth, Mehdi El Glaoui, is invited by his girlfriend, Garance Trousselard, to stay with her parents in their French retreat for a week.
After seven years of belittlement in underpaid servitude, the Azizi family have had enough. They refuse to continue pandering to the whims of the Trousselards as their estate caretakers and demand 150,000 euros compensation.
Mehdi, as a business law graduate and the only character genuinely capable of empathising with both sides, is left with the task of mediating between the Trousselards and the Azizis.
It’s important to remember his own motivations are hardly unselfish, as he aspires to successfully grasp an internship with Garance’s father and win her family’s approval in turn.
Phillipe is an insufferable egomanical patriach of the household, pouting and quoting latin at every available opportunity. Laurence is a has-been tv actress who floats around the villa sucking her teeth as the sight of Nadine cleaning windows using damp newspaper. Garance, a morally and intellectually bankrupt aspiring actress, struts around in a bikini for much of the film. Meanwhile, Tony and Nadine Azizi themselves reveal a less than naively innocent side to their character in turn.
The actors portray these horrid people expertly. I found myself laughing and cringing at their antics. Laure Calamy is both radiant and shrewdly calculating as Nadine, deftly lockstepping with lawyer Phillipe’s attempts to worm his way out of the mess. Noée Abita does such an effective job at making the beautiful Garance repugnant and laughable as a spoilt princess who cannot cry for an audition tape because she has never had cause to in her entire life.
The south of France scenery is stunning, a useful backdrop to highlight privilege and suggest that the Azizis really might have not had it quite as bad as they assert despite the evidence we were shown earlier.
The Party’s Over! goes beyond a typical satirical criticism of class warfare by exploring the hypocrisy of parasitical relationships. Manipulative tactics by the actors cleverly stitch back stories and potential gaps closer together although not entirely.
After inching sluggishly along for the first chapter, the plot felt hurried. The characters’ escalations feel rash, more for the sake of keeping the story moving than organic. Azizi daughter, Maylou, had minimal presence on set except as a sacrificial lamb to class distinction, exemplified by Garance’s instrumentation. Racial and financial disparity are leaned on a bit too hard to add supposed complexity to Medhi and partially Tony. Hints of chemistry fizzle out quickly as dead ends. That prevented things from becoming too predictable, instead they’re shocking, but it felt jagged.
Six and a half stars out of ten.
Running time: 95 minutes
Rating: M
*By Gayle O’Leary. If you’d like to catch up on more by Gayle here on Fremantle Shipping News, look right here!
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