Don's Party - Plot

Plot

Don Henderson is a schoolteacher living with his wife Kath and baby son in suburban Melbourne. On the night of the 1969 federal election Don invites a small group of friends to celebrate a predicted Australian Labor Party (ALP) election victory, much to the dismay of his wife. To the party come Mal, Don’s university mentor, and his bitter wife Jenny, sex-obsessed Cooley and his latest girlfriend, nineteen-year-old Susan, Evan, a dentist, and his beautiful artist wife Kerry. Somehow, two Liberal supporters, Simon and Jody also come.

As the party wears on it becomes clear that Labor, who are supported by Don and most of the guests, are not winning. As a result the drinking goes up a few notches, and the sniping between Don and his male friends about their failed aspirations gets uglier, as does their behaviour toward the women. Mack, a design engineer whose wife has just left him, pulls out a nude photo of her for his friends' approval. Crass womaniser Cooley pursues the available women. The disillusioned wives exchange tales of their husbands' subpar sexual performance. By the end of the night, Don and some of his friends have begun to grasp the emptiness of their compromised lives.

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