It’s New Year’s Eve, the one night a year when otherwise commonplace parties take on a slightly desperate significance, a need to succeed. You have to set the tone for the year ahead, and warm prosecco on an emptying dancefloor doesn’t bode well for anyone. This degree of pressure sets up almost any celebration to fail – though a bad party can launch as many formative memories as a good one. Look at the movies where parties pave the way for swooning romantic connection, social catastrophe or the end of the world: with the help of a few drinks, any drama speeds up.
It’s a New Year’s Eve party, specifically, that finally brings closure to the will-they-won’t-they relationship dance that keeps Rob Reiner and Nora Ephron’s When Harry Met Sally so sparklingly afloat. That single scene has made the film go-to 31 December viewing for anyone spending the night in. In George Cukor’s delicious 1938 romcom Holiday, a lavish, overpopulated New Year’s Eve party is what brings Katharine Hepburn’s headstrong heiress and Cary Grant’s starry-eyed striver together – in an old children’s playroom, away from the crowd.
