Fun at Parties presents a Berlin subculture in which an international group of young people dance, take drugs, and, fitfully, try to run a nightclub. It’s easy to imagine it as a reality-style TV show, with its lengthy direct-to-audience confessionals by the many characters, all played by four cast members, describing their insecurities and journey to being cool. As in most stories about party culture, the hedonism reaches a peak, and then goes too far. Everyone wakes up sadder but wiser.
It’s well-trodden ground, and, unfortunately, Fun at Parties doesn’t discover anything new within that territory. Further, being staged rather than televised means that its many monologues feel static rather than edgy. Characters flit in and out, disappearing bewilderingly, and it can be difficult to figure out who’s supposed to be central and who’s peripheral. The acting is uneven, compounded by the multiple roles the actors perform, and some characters fail to rise above caricature.
The city of Berlin is essentially a fifth character, as the group struggles to make sense of their new home: is it more techno, or tech? The obvious answer, that – like most modern cities – it can encompass both louche and corporate communities, never seems to occur to them, and this tells us much more about the preoccupations of young people who never leave their bubble than it does about Berlin.
There’s potential to say more interesting things about the city. Its rightward tilt is mentioned in passing, but more attention is given to the difficulties of immigration and the challenges of managing gentrification, which are generic problems found in every European country. Instead of reflections on Berlin as a place of transience that captures people in moments of possibility before they return home and settle down, we get stale jokes about how hard it is to get into Berghain.
Fun at Parties does deliver some laugh-out-loud lines, and there are moments in which it seems about to come to life, before veering once more back into monologue. Most of the interesting character developments get crammed into the epilogue, which is told rather than depicted. It’s a nice touch to have their stories, but, by that point, it’s too late: the party’s over.
