When we first meet Mary (Parker Posey), she’s down on her hands and knees on the landing of a classic New York City staircase, searching for an earring dropped by none other than Lady Bunny, who simply can’t go on without her “little plastic baby boy.” The earring is found and Mary continues up the stairs, where she’s collecting entry fees for an underground party. Everything’s going great until the cops arrive and haul Mary off to jail. Bailed out by her godmother Judy (Sasha von Scherler, mother of director Daisy von Scherler Mayer), a no-nonsense librarian, Mary tries to get a loan as well and receives a lecture on fiscal responsibility, followed by a job offer to work as a library clerk.
Outside of working hours, Mary continues her club kid lifestyle, hanging out with the cool crowd and looking fabulous while doing so. Let the record show this movie appeared three years before the TV series Sex and the City and one year before the publication of the book that inspired it, so it’s clear which way the influence ran. Mary is all about living in the moment and is not ready to take anything seriously, as revealed by her entertaining, in rapid succession, her prospects of succeeding as a designer, an actor, a writer, and an investment banker.
One of those things is not like the others, but they all seem equally plausible to Mary, who could be really annoying did Parker Posey not make her so guilelessly cute and charming. If Posey’s look in this film feels familiar, that could be because she played character with a remarkably similar sense of style one year later in Greg Mottola’s The Daytrippers.
Party Girl feels more like a series of vignettes than an organized story, and to say it strains one’s sense of credibility is to be kind, but it offers a great look at New York City life in the 1990s. Many of the people involved in the making of this film were part of the downtown queer club scene at the time and I’m sure someone who knows that milieu better than I could identify many of the performers who appear as background players. Named characters include Mary’s gay best friend Derrick (Anthony DeSando), her sometime boyfriend Nigel (Liev Schreiber, who would also appear in The Daytrippers with Posey a year later), her pal Leo (Guillermo Diaz), her new romantic partner Mustafa (Omar Townsend), and club manager Rene (Ford model Donna Mitchell).
Daisy von Scherler Mayer co-wrote Party Girl with Harry Birckmayer and shot it in 19 days on a budget of $150,000. Costume designer Michael Clancy comes up with a unique series of looks for Mary and cinematographer Michael Slovis really captures the feel of the time and place. Party Girl also occupies a special place in cinema history as the first feature film to premiere on the internet. | Sarah Boslaugh
Party Girl will be screened as the closing film at QFest St. Louis on June 1 at 7:30pm. The film will be introduced by Cole Sawyer from the St. Louis County Library and there will be tables in the lobby selling LGBTQ+ books (by Novel Neighbor) and offering information about library programming and the opportunity to sign up for a library card (by the St. Louis County Library). More information and tickets are available from the Cinema St Louis web site.
