The Riot Club takes you inside the lives of the people you love to hate
If you have to ask to join the Riot Club, the club doesn’t want you. How will you know if you’re one of the chosen ones in this elite all-male Oxford University club? Chances are you’ll find yourself blindfolded, gulping down a drink that is liberally garnished with cigarettes, maggots, snot … do you want me to go on?
If this sounds like child’s play, rest assured, it’s not. Once you’re anointed a member of this all-male elite Oxford University club, you’re set for life. You automatically become friends with the billionaires of your generation, the men who will run countries, corporations and — for the moment — your college.
That’s the lure of the club for two freshmen Alistair and Miles, who endure several rounds of hazing before they’re accepted as members. A celebratory dinner is organised to welcome the fresh Rioters, but this is no ordinary welcome party, as the two freshmen discover. Reputations are made or broken at the table, as the 10 members of the club go to any lengths to get the popular vote to bag the coveted president’s slot.
Lone Scherfig’s The Riot Club is an adaptation of the 2010 British play Posh, based on the exploits of members of Oxford University’s Bullingdon Club, founded in 1870. Previous Bullingdon members include British prime minister David Cameron, chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne and London mayor Boris Johnson.
But while they go to great lengths to join the club, no member would want to be publicly identified as a ‘Buller’.
Bullers are banned from meeting within 15 miles of Oxford ever since a dinner in 1927 when one member of the club smashed every single window on a college’s grounds. A dining society, the Bullingdon prides itself on a no-holds-barred approach to seeking pleasure. The club holds two main events during the year — a breakfast and a dinner — where each member is provided with his own garbage bag at the start of the event, just in case the opulent dinner or free-flowing booze makes you want to vomit. So you can see why it would be awkward for the British PM if stories of drug use, trashing Michelin-starred restaurants and fist fights were to be spoken of — in fact, a photograph of the PM from his Bullingdon days has been whitewashed from the media after the picture’s owners withdrew permission to reproduce it anywhere.
The Riot Club faithfully reenacts these dinners and is set in the dining room of a local pub. As the audience is trapped in this room for much of the film, it becomes evident pretty fast what binds these 10 boys together, besides their staggering wealth. Each nurses a chip on his shoulder against the ‘plebs’ — the swarming ‘lower’ and ‘working class’ population — who don’t simply bow and scrape before these rich boys as they really should.
Just as you’re getting deliciously puffed up with indignity at the boys’ politically incorrect rants, you’re deflated by just how shrill and predictable their detractors sound. Therefore, it is easy to understand why Miles doesn’t walk out of the dinner as he becomes the butt of the club’s vicious humour when the other members find out his girlfriend is ‘not posh’ — he might not like being bullied, but he doesn’t want to be one of the outsiders, sniffing judgmentally at the cool crowd. The film doesn’t let its viewers comfortably take sides and, in doing so, leaves one with the cinematic equivalent of a wriggly tooth you just can’t leave alone — it’s terrible when rich people behave badly, but boy oh boy we love watching them when they do.
Published in The Express Tribune, Sunday Magazine, February 22nd, 2015.
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