Brexit satire draws big laughs at Berlin fest

An uproarious British satire shot during the Brexit referendum drew big laughs at the Berlin film festival Monday, with Sally Potter using a stellar cast for "a light and loving look" at a "broken England".

In "The Party", shot entirely in black and white, Kristin Scott Thomas plays Janet, a British MP who has just become health minister and throws an intimate soiree with her husband (Timothy Spall) and closest friends to celebrate.

Her clique is a well-heeled international set including April, an acerbic American (Patricia Clarkson) living in London who declares parliamentary politics to be "finished" but nevertheless believes the new minister can "save our country from profiteering butchery". 

Her German lover (Bruno Ganz) is a "life coach and healer" who dismisses Western medicine as "voodoo".

Another friend of the family is an agitated City "wanker banker" from Ireland (Cillian Murphy) who slips away to the toilet as soon as he arrives to snort cocaine and fiddle with the handgun he has hidden in his jacket.

Finally a lesbian couple, separated in age by two decades, arrives with the younger partner (Emily Mortimer) announcing that she is pregnant with male triplets.

In the course of a little more than a whirlwind hour, secrets and lies are exposed, marriages and lives shattered and careers left teetering on the brink. 

Potter told reporters after a press preview that drew warm applause that she had started writing the screenplay during the 2015 British general election but didn't shoot it until the week before and after the Brexit vote.

"Things have become polarised since I first started writing but what was central to it was the feeling that people were losing faith in political life, losing the ability to even know what the truth was," she said.

"That's why truth-telling is so central to the politics in this story, all kinds of truth-telling in personal life and in political life."

- 'Change your hair' -

Asked about the cosmopolitan cast and crew, Potter said it was clear that the themes of disaffection and a loss of faith in public officials resonated far beyond Britain. 

"I wanted a feeling on both sides of the camera of internatio

nalism -- the opposite of the dynamic of Brexit, by the way," she said. "And Trump," Clarkson added.

Janet, as an ambitious, highly competent middle-aged blonde politician with trouble connecting with voters and a cheating husband named Bill, seems tragically, comically doomed. 

April advises her during one scene: "If you're going to lead this country, and you must," she says, "you're going to have to change your hair."

Potter is best known for films such as "Orlando" and "Ginger & Rosa" as well as being a sought-after opera director. 

She said that while she was pessimistic about the impact of Brexit, despair wasn't the answer. 

"Sometimes the most positive thing to do is to look bad stuff in the face and laugh about it," she said.

"The Party" is one of 18 movies vying for the festival's Golden Bear top prize, to be awarded Saturday.

Potter is one of four female directors in the competition.