"Now ... everything is up for grabs!" -- Meryl Streep in Plenty (dinner party scene, part 2/2)

Watch part I of this dinner party scene first:    • "My husband ... got me out of the bin...  .... Susan Traherne, outraged at the invasion of Egypt in 1956, lashes out at her husband (Charles Dance), a British diplomat, and his colleague Sir Leonard Darwin, played by John Gielgud. 1985, directed by Fred Schepisi. Music by Bruce Smeaton. (This clip is part 2 of the scene. I would have preferred to post the entire scene as one clip, but YouTube flagged it as a copyright violation.) This clip starts slow, but give it a minute-- it takes a turn.

David Denby: "[Streep] has one great scene--a dinner party during the Suez crisis, in which she is smashingly dressed in a black strapless gown and her neck looks snaky and powerful, darting this way and that as she rakes the guests and her husband with her scorn for Britain's declining power. She can make neurosis disturbingly sexual...." -- New York, September 30, 1985

Stephen Schiff: "[A]n icily brilliant performance."

David Thomson: "With Hare's text, and Meryl Streep's very brave performance, Schepisi showed us a woman helplessly drawn to terrible, dangerous gestures... Plenty seemed to me at first a failure... But I cannot get the film out of my head, and I'm still not sure how much of that comes from Hare, Streep, or Schepisi. My only answer so far is that these are three profound, unstable talents, drawn toward difficulty and discomfort."

- A Biographical Dictionary of Film, 3rd Edition, 1994- entry on Fred Schepisi

Read more about Streep's performane at https://streepplenty.blogspot.com

(Ad disclaimer: I do not own the rights to the film Plenty, and do not know what ads they will run with this clip.)