Parker Posey in Party Girl is the epitome of Brat

Party Girl (1995)

Brat summer might seem like a new phenomenon, but Parker Posey was already doing it 30 years ago as the outrageous bratty Party Girl.

Spontaneous and unruly, Mary is the epitome of ‘brat’. She parties and struts around New York with audacious spirit and the most fabulously wild wardrobe (so Julia).

The ‘brat’ trend was prompted by Charli XCX’s album Brat and embraces the messy and the outrageous. Brat summer is considered to be a reaction against parasitic patriarchal tropes like clean girl culture that so toxically swept the internet in 2020 (although isn’t there also something a little faux feminist in the implication that being ‘hot’ is necessary to achieve the ‘brat’ persona? But that’s a conversation for another day).

‘Brat’ is Julia Fox’s cluttered New York apartment, adorned with mouse traps, instead of the spotless minimalist apartments of those infamous AD Open Door videos; it’s Charli’s smudged liner instead of slick-back buns and ‘dewy’ make up. And at its centre is that all-important ritual: partying.

And in Party Girl, director Daisy von Scherler Mayer nails it. The film opens with Mary having been arrested for organising an illegal rave in NYC, need I say more? Her aunt bails her out, and in return has Mary work in her library. She becomes quite possibly the best dressed librarian in cinema history, romances a Lebanese street-food vendor, and continues to party all the while. She even speaks like Charli, with quippy deadpan delivery.

Charli XCX x Parker Posey in Party Girl

And in Party Girl, director Daisy von Scherler Mayer nails it. The film opens with Mary having been arrested for organising an illegal rave in NYC, need I say more? Her aunt bails her out, and in return has Mary work in her library. She becomes quite possibly the best dressed librarian in cinema history, romances a Lebanese street-food vendor, and continues to party all the while. She even speaks like Charli, with quippy deadpan delivery.

As she spends more time stuck in the library, devoted to the Dewey Decimal System, Mary’s identity shifts and expands.

But Scherler Mayer ensures that Mary never chooses between bumping drugs at the nightclub and loaning books at the library; she never has to squash her Party Girl personality in place of the Hollywood ‘good girl’, she does both. There’s no Pretty Woman trajectory here.

Mary describes her lifestyle as all about “Maintaining when we’re f–ked up, applying makeup,… flirting, making stuff up, throwing parties and having fun.” This line could be straight out of 360. Mary is the original brat, and Party Girl is the perfect movie to accompany your Brat Summer.