"To each his own." Antony Cordier's film, unveiled in the 57th Directors' Fortnight at the 78th Cannes Film Festival is set in the midst of a class struggle that escalates under the summer sun and in the gritty, playful vein of French comedy in small-scale theatre mode, combining farce and sociological scalpel. The Party's Over! is an immersion that gives its seven performers the opportunity to have a field day, in a conflict spiral that builds to a crescendo of increasingly uncontrolled excesses over five days.

"Strictly speaking, their job is to be here for us when we're here." Apart from his annoying appetite for Latin locutions, lawyer Philippe Trousselard (Laurent Lafitte) is the perfect prototype of the well-born, hyper-cynical materialist. In his luxury holiday villa at the top of a secluded hill, he intends to enjoy his holidays, from swimming with crayfish to fine wines, from the infinity pool to the suspended solarium, from the organic vegetable garden to the latest household appliances. Alongside him are his wife Laure (Élodie Bouchez), a well-known actress whose career has stalled somewhat, and their daughter Garance (Noée Abita), who has invited her latest boyfriend, Mehdi (Sami Outalbali), a young idealist from a working-class background who graduated top of his class in law.

A couple of caretakers, Nadine (Laure Calamy) and Tony (Ramzy Bedia) Aziz, and their 20-year-old daughter, Marylou (Mahia Zrouki), live downstairs to look after the household (from cleaning to odd jobs). The stage is set, the characters sketched in their antagonistic social identities (with Medhi as a class defector), and now it's time for war! A succession of humiliations ("you need to think a little", "my words have gone beyond my thoughts - what are you thinking?") sends Tony over the edge, and the Trousselards decide to put an abrupt end to their professional relationship with the Azizs. But the Azizs don't see it that way: "Do you think you can just dismiss us like that?" Between negotiations, provocations, low blows and pride, tensions rise quickly and unreasonably...

Adapted by the director and Julie Peyr from a screenplay by Jean-Alain Laban and Steven Mitz, the narrative mechanics of The Party’s Over! prove to be formidably effective and rather ferociously funny, fuelled by meaningful shortcuts, words that hurt as much as they do, and a sustained sequence of events that could almost be described as burlesque if they weren't part of a rather realistic social story that has simply been put through a distorting mirror. Faced with close-knit families, attack-defence and the general lure of gain, there is little room for innocence, and the natural enemies are perhaps not so natural after all. It's a scathing observation that the whole cast relishes in, and one that lends an acidic cachet to a film that nevertheless sails in relatively “mainstream” waters rarely traversed by the Fortnight in recent times.

The Party’s Over! was produced by French company Cheyenne Federation and co-produced by Belgian company Umedia. France tv Distribution handles international sales.