The Party · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Bakshi loses his shoe in the indoor stream. It floats off down the little decorative canal that runs through the producer's gleaming house, and he goes after it — hopping, one-socked, fishing for it without letting anyone see, without raising his voice, without ceasing for one second to be a polite guest. That hop is the whole film. A small object comes loose, dignity insists on staying intact, and the gap between the two widens into disaster.

Deleuze gave the comedy of the small object a precise name: the small form of the action-image. In the large form — the Western, the war epic Bakshi has just blown up — a vast situation bears down on a hero until he acts and changes it. The small form runs the arrow backwards: a tiny action discloses a situation we couldn't otherwise see. The gag is its purest case. A man reaches for a stuffed chicken portion and the reach reveals the booby-trapped physics of an entire room. Every one of Bakshi's mishaps is a little probe that lights up the hostile logic of the house — the retractable bar, the intercom, the trick plumbing. You learn what the place is only by watching it defeat someone. This is the burlesque lineage Deleuze traces through Keaton and Chaplin, and The Party belongs to it body and soul: it descends directly from Sherlock Jr.'s deadpan figure choreographing himself against a mechanical world, and from Modern Times, where modernity itself becomes the adversary and the body is the thing that gets ground down — only Edwards moves the machine from the factory to the luxury home.

But here Edwards does something stranger than slapstick, and it's why Deleuze is worth bringing to a comedy at all. He strings these small forms into a feature with almost no plot. At the close of Cinema 1, Deleuze lists the symptoms by which the action-image fell into crisis around mid-century — the signs that the old situation-action-situation machine had jammed. A dispersive situation: many characters, weakly linked, no single line running through them. Weak links: cause and effect slackened, scenes chained by accumulation rather than necessity. The voyage or balade form: a trip, a stroll, that transforms nothing. He found these in Antonioni, in the New Wave, in Altman's overheard crowds. The Party has every one of them — wearing a tuxedo, played for laughs. The producer's party is a pure dispersive ensemble; the evening is a balade through rooms; the "plot" is just Bakshi wandering until the foam rises. Edwards arrived at the grammar of modern cinema by way of the sight gag, which is the joke and the genius of it.

What carries the film, with story gone, is the body. Sellers's Bakshi is comedy of posture and attitude — the over-careful bow, the held smile, the hands that don't know where to go. Deleuze calls this the gest: a bearing that exposes a social relation rather than narrating an event. Bakshi's courtliness is a foreign grammar the room cannot read, and the gest of the polite outsider is the film's real subject — a relation made visible in the angle of a spine. (That this outsider is a white star in brownface is the thing the film can no longer outrun, and shouldn't; the gest is precise even where the casting is not.) It's the social-disruption premise of A Night at the Opera, the anarchic guest demolishing a formal occasion — but Edwards locates the anarchy in a single courteous body rather than a wrecking crew.

The house earns its billing as co-star. Edwards and cinematographer Lucien Ballard hold the camera wide and deep, treating the frame as a closed, information-dense set — a system you read across, not a backdrop. A catastrophe simmers in the background while your attention is nominally elsewhere; a shoe travels off through rooms we don't see, pure relative out-of-field, the disaster always implied just past the edge. This is Bazin's deep focus — the long held shot that lets the eye choose where to look — repurposed for comedy, and it is the most direct debt in the film: to Tati's Mon Oncle, whose push-button house turns on its owners, and to Playtime, the near-plotless deep-focus ensemble where the architecture itself generates and absorbs the gags. From The Music Box comes the other principle — the single-location catastrophe built by patient accumulation, each failed act compounding the last. The whole picture is an organic montage in Deleuze's sense: not collision but a spiral, chaos ratcheting upward by growth until the soap foam drowns the set.

What did it do to film? It proved an American studio could finance a feature comedy that runs almost entirely on sustained situation and choreography — improvised inside a skeletal outline, the takes reviewed live on a video tap so a gag found in performance could be kept while it was warm. No act structure, no engine but the steady widening of disorder. That's a chamber experiment in pure mise-en-scène, and it pulled Hollywood comedy toward the European object-cinema of Tati it so plainly loves.

Watch it again and watch the edges. The foreground reaction is the cheap laugh; the film is happening in deep space, at the rim of the frame, where the house is quietly winning. Follow the shoe.