Party Girl
Party Girl is coming back to the theaters nearly three decades after its release in a remarkable restoration (seriously — this film didn’t look this good on 35 mm in its initial release) from Fun City Editions and FilmRise. Daisy Von Scherler Mayer’s 1995 film is a singular and frothy blend of city symphony and character study, raw drama and screwball comedy.
It does what the best New York films do, which is capture the pressure cooker of life and how it forces the wildest and most unexpected facets of who you are out to where they can soar or plummet. Mary (Parker Posey, alive in a way that is iconic but not afraid to be real about the shitty choices we make sometimes) is a partier, a bon vivant, a beacon of fashionable life, and barely staying afloat. Is the respectability of the NYC library system her destiny? Maybe. But is the journey going to be fraught with a lot of difficult questions and an impeccable soundtrack? You better believe it.
As a portrait of early-mid-’90s New York City (and I was there), the film endures because it doesn’t insist on its own legacy. Hindsight allows Mary’s nightlife shenanigans to serve as a bulwark against the anti-club crusades of disgraced Trump crony/then-NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a rightful moral correction to the way that the decade’s dance-floor reputation has for so long been tied to the Party Monster era (and its puppetmaster, tax evader Peter Gatien). But you don’t have to know that to understand that Party Girl gets that the nightclub and the library are both essential parts of the human experience.
It’s a film that rewards repeat viewings and carbonates lookbooks for all future generations. Proffer a sincere “He-he-hello” to your best friends and most scandalous librarians and curl up with some gleeful joy and an absolute minimum of tracks involving Teddy Rogers.
