What does a 68-minute movie look like?

I've seen a number of films over the years that were less than an hour long that I have reluctantly characterized as movies. At first I didn't want to because I feared that it was an apples-to-oranges comparison, but ultimately I became convinced that the 45-minute Buster Keaton film Sherlock Jr., for example, belongs in all my lists alongside other films of proper feature length. It could have been because I loved Sherlock Jr. so much.

But I can't remember the last time -- maybe never -- that I saw a modern movie, with a cast of name actors and from an acclaimed director, that failed to even cross the 70-minute mark.

Until, that is, Saturday night, when my wife and I watched Sally Potter's 2017 film The Party.

We thought there was at least a chance that it was made for the BBC or something, but nope, it competed at Berlin and actually won some prize called the Guild Film Prize. (Forgive me if I am unfamiliar with the lesser prizes at the Berlin International Film Festival.)

If you wanted to try to dismiss it on other grounds, you can't, because it stars Kristin Scott Thomas, Patricia Clarkson, Bruno Ganz, Cillian Murphy, Timothy Spall, Cherry Jones and Emily Mortimer. Each and every one of them a household name, at least in houses that know a thing or two about movies.

Well, I can't tell you what "a" 68-minute movie looks like, but I can tell you what this particular 68-minute movie looks like. It's about a party to celebrate the appointment (election?) of Thomas' character as a shadow minister for the British opposition party, which includes some of her closest friends, though how much they can truly call themselves friends is made manifest over the course of a chaotic evening in which secrets and betrayals are revealed. It takes place in just a single house and is more or less in real time. You'd swear it was adapted from a play if you didn't know that the filmmaker herself wrote it. Oh, and it's also in black and white.

And you know what?

Sixty-eight minutes is the perfect length for this film.

As I was watching I thought of the Roman Polanski film Carnage, also very short but an epic compared to this, clocking in at 80 minutes. I can tell you it feels a lot more than 12 minutes longer. That's because this actual play adaptation -- which features Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet, John C. Reilly and Christoph Waltz -- is confined to its single location in ways that feel trying and artificial. As these two sets of parents argue with one another over what their children might have done to each other on a playground, one set continually gestures toward leaving the apartment but never does. Now, I'm a person who hates false starts and false departures in all arenas of life -- once you've said goodbye, get lost. A whole movie full of them started to drain me from about the first false departure, which couldn't have been more than 15 minutes in. (I see now that I already wrote about Carnage a few years ago, if you want to read more of my ranting and raving on the topic.)

The problem with a movie like Carnage is that it seems to contain excessive amounts of filler just to get it up to a barely respectable feature length -- or, I suppose, long enough to make theatergoers feel satisfied about parting with their 90 bucks.

The Party doesn't worry about that. It just stops at 68 minutes. It leaves you wanting more, and what happens in it is tantalizing enough that you do, indeed, want more. (I won't spoil the movie, but I will tell you that it ends on a perfect moment of uncertainty.)

Now, Wikipedia is ruining part of my argument -- or at least the title of this post -- by claiming that The Party is 71 minutes long. Well, Wikipedia can go fuck itself. The DVD case says 68 minutes and that's what I'm going with.

It certainly did feel short, but it didn't feel stillborn. It felt like a complete movie, albeit a bit like a stage adaptation. And I respected that Sally Potter didn't care about what length a movie needs to be in order to meet our conventional expectations of it. Just tell the story you want to tell and not an ounce more of inessential fat.

I'm not going to say I loved The Party -- the three stars I gave it on Letterboxd may have been a half-star too low, but it more or less encapsulates my feelings accurately. But I loved The Party's brevity, which I won't even call brevity because it was exactly as long as it needed to be. Okay, let's call it brevity, if only to say "Brevity is the soul of wit." The Party is witty, and because it doesn't artificially distend itself, it didn't leave me crawling up the walls either.

Which is a good standard for a successful Saturday night viewing experience.

Trapped in a room with Roman Polanski

Roman Polanski used to paint on big canvases.

A sprawling noir that penetrates every seedy corner of Los Angeles (Chinatown). A kidnapping thriller that meanders through modern-day Paris (Frantic). A holocaust drama about a preternaturally talented musician (The Pianist). An adaptation of one of the most beloved pieces of British literature (Oliver Twist). Actually, make that two (Tess).

Even when his settings were confined to comparatively small spaces, they dealt with heady, big-canvas issues (witchcraft/devil possession in Rosemary's Baby).

Lately, though, the walls have been closing in on the now-octogenarian.

The French language Venus in Fur marks Polanski's second straight film where his characters are like birds stuck in houses, flapping desperately at skylights, trying to get out of their prisons.

The first of these films, 2011's Carnage, is claustrophobia incarnate. With the exception of a brief scene at the beginning and a brief scene at the end (if memory serves), the entire story takes place inside one New York apartment, between two warring sets of parents. The movie runs a mere 80 minutes, but I felt every one of those minutes passing by.

Then Venus in Fur takes place entirely inside a theater between just two characters, as an audition by an actress morphs into an increasingly bizarre and in-depth reading of the play with the writer-director. This one runs 96 far-more-tolerable minutes.

I like Venus in Fur a lot better -- in fact, I like it a lot. But after finishing, I couldn't fail to notice that I had shifted viewing spots six times in those 96 minutes.

I started out sitting at the kitchen table. Then I moved out to the couch. Then, when I was getting too sleepy on the couch, I moved into the backyard for a little cool air. I repeated these same three hops before finally finishing the movie where I started: at the kitchen table. My laptop charged up a little of its battery on each pit stop through the kitchen table.

Feels a bit like I was that bird flapping at that skylight.

Like I said, though, at least all this claustrophobia is in service of a far worthier cause in Venus in Fur. Carnage I thought was just stagy and tedious. It did not seem like a remotely useful match between director and subject matter, and I wanted to punch all four of the actors by the time it was over -- actors I have liked, nay, loved in other contexts.

It was seeing one of Carnage's greatest flaws in Venus in Fur that brought the comparison to mind, though. One of the most annoying, overused devices in Carnage was characters almost leaving, but not actually doing so. It's the apartment belonging to one couple (Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly), so the other couple (Kate Winslet and Christophe Waltz) is always on the verge of beating feet. Except in the audience we know that they are never actually going to leave, because we've heard enough about the movie's format to know it all takes place in this one setting. So each time someone makes a move for the door but then calls an audible, it's incredibly frustrating because you can see right through the ruse.

Unfortunately, Polanski went back to this well in Venus in Fur, but not as outrageously. Not so that I felt a vein in my forehead start to pulse every time a character gestured toward an exit, anyway. But the math is a bit striking: There are no less than four separate occasions when the actress -- played by Polanski's wife, Emmanuelle Seigner -- fakes an exit and has to be coaxed back by the director (Mathieu Amalric). "Methinks she doth exit too much."

There's a funny literal meaning to the title of this post, as Amalric has basically been asked to do an impersonation of his director. Since I'm not familiar with the day-to-day Polanski, I can only be sure of Amalric's physical similarity, a surely intentional one. Amalric has the same hairstyle that Polanski wore in his younger years, and he looks enough like him in other ways that I almost have to wonder if this was one of the primary reasons he was cast. (Other than Amalric being one of France's most prized acting talents.) The fact that this is clearly a portrait of himself -- there's a running discussion of how much an artist appears in his own characters -- makes Polanski's project all the more interesting. Especially as it gets into the character's psychosexual proclivities.

What I wonder is why Polanski has chosen to shrink his scale lately. Sure, he has dabbled in claustrophobia before (Repulsion is a prime example), but before now he had plenty of open spaces in his films. I'd say that he's winding down now that he's in his 80s, but that hasn't stopped the likes of Clint Eastwood (84), Woody Allen (79) and Ridley Scott (77). (Yes, I get that only one of those guys is actually in his 80s. Leave me alone.)

At least the theater is used more dynamically than the apartment in Carnage. Not like the theater is used in Birdman, of course, but enough that it could generously be considered a character of its own. Even though that is a pretty hackneyed thing to say about a setting.

The real difference from Carnage is that Polanski seems to have something to say, and interesting actors giving dedicated performances with which to say it. This is an acting clinic by Seigner and Amalric, who explore the provocative themes from David Ives' play: gender roles and power dynamics, sado-masochism, the relationship between an artist and his/her subject matter, and so forth. It kept my attention, even if it didn't keep me in one seat.

One thing did bother me, though, so I'll just awkwardly squeeze it in at the end of the post, even if it doesn't really relate to the rest of what I'm talking about. Venus in Fur relies heavily on the two actors slipping in and out of "performing" -- they perform both real and improvised lines from the play, in character, and they also carry on a dialogue as actor and director. They can alternate between these two layers of reality with only imperceptible changes, and sometimes, we're meant not to know which lines of dialogue are spoken by the actor and the director, and which spoken by the characters they're playing.

Except we do know, thanks to a decision made in the subtitling phase. It was decided that the subtitles could be used to help differentiate between Seigner the actor and Seigner the character, and Amalric the director and Amalric the character. When the "real" version of each actor is speaking, the text appears in standard font. When they are playing the character in the play, though, the font switches to italics.

While this is superficially useful, it also spoon-feeds us something that a French audience wouldn't have. A French audience is left to detect whether it's the actor or the character speaking based on changes in inflection, tone and vocabulary. My argument, though, is that this is something you can figure out even if you don't speak the language. And I'd have preferred to figure it out myself, because these characters are supposed to be blending and blurring and crossing lines between reality and fantasy. There are moments we aren't supposed to know which is real and which is a performance, and that's kind of the point. Once I began fixating on the changes to the subtitle font, though, it left no doubt about how the director -- or somebody, anyway -- thought we were supposed to interpret the action currently on screen. I like being able to decide myself what any given moment means, and what degree of blurring these characters currently find themselves in.

Still, that's a tangential artistic decision and does not really have to do with the actual text of the film. Good job, Roman Polanski. You may still have some useful films in you after all.