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.