Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie review – absolutely fatuous, thank God
3 / 5 stars
Some were
trepidatious about this belated big-screen outing for the fashionista
sitcom. In fact, post-referendum, the timing couldn’t be better …
and neither could Joanna Lumley
Peter Bradshaw
Wednesday 29 June
2016 22.46 BST
Sixty is the new 40,
90 is the new 70 and Jennifer Saunders’s Edina and Joanna Lumley’s
Patsy are back – along with Edina’s very elderly mum, played by
June Whitfield. The less-than-dynamic duo make a characteristically
wobbly and hungover reappearance in heels, champagne flutes in one
hand and cigarettes in the other. No nonsense about vaping.
It’s as if they
showed up here through a worm-hole from the 1990s – arriving in
2016 for our summer of non-love, making a game entrance in a country
where the recent referendum has caused depression in the hearts of
fully 100% of those who voted. Patsy and Edina are here on an
honourable mission to cheer us up - bless them. And a fair bit of the
time they succeed.
It’s impossible to
watch Joanna Lumley’s pursed-lip expression of disdain and
suppressed nausea without laughing and the same goes for Saunders’s
childlike pout of dismay and incomprehension. It’s always very
funny when they have to run. Half-way through the film they make a
mad and semi-logical dash to the south of France, using a budget
airline. Not needing a visa was a bit of a boon.
This is a broad,
silly, likably daft Britcom, made possible by the colossal commercial
success of the Inbetweeners films - movies based on British TV shows
can do well at the box office. It’s basically 50 minutes of
material stretched out to 90 on a daisy-chain of cameos, including
Christopher Biggins (of course), Judith Chalmers, Graham Norton and
Barry Humphries. Orla Guerin and Jeremy Paxman make their own
good-sport contributions. There are also, naturally, as in the
Zoolander sequel, heavyweight walk-ons from many a fashion ledge,
such as Alexa Chung, Stella McCartney and of course Kate Moss
herself.
The fashion people
are all absolute kryptonite to comedy of course. The film becomes
less funny with every syllable that Stella is allowed to say and Kate
is utterly and uncompromisingly wooden in an imperious manner that
commands a kind of respect. Her recent IRL contretemps with the
“basic bitch” easyJet flight attendant clearly inspired the scene
here in which Patsy faces off with a dead-eyed budget airline
stewardess played, inevitably, by Rebel Wilson.
The situation is
that Patsy and Edina are in a jam. Eddie’s handsome West London
home may have to be relinquished due to financial embarrassments and
Edina does not have any of what Patsy vaguely calls “hand money”.
Saffy (Julia Sawalha) still lives with them, and she has a teenage
daughter by an ex-partner that our unscrupulous heroines try to
exploit for fashion purposes.
And in 2016, no one
cares about PR any more. It no longer has the cachet it once had. And
poor Edina has yet to grasp that in the world of Instagram and
Twitter people are increasingly doing their own PR. Edina is stuck
with a dismal client list that is confined to Lulu and Baby Spice
(cameos, naturally) and a “boutique vodka”.
Their ultimate
crisis arrives on attending a party where Kate Moss is to be found,
chatting to Jon Hamm. Patsy makes a leering approach to Hamm, who
looks at her blankly and then flinches when he remembers how they
first met: “You took my virginity, leave me my sanity...” he
whimpers. But there is a catastrophe involving Kate Moss and Edina
and Patsy have to go on the run.
Basically, Joanna
Lumley saves this film: she has an imperishable hauteur and
comedy-charisma. She is the garden bridge that stops this film from
collapsing into the Thames. You don’t need silly cameos when you’ve
got Lumley. The scene at the beginning when she injects her face with
Botox is a showstopper. Nicolas Winding Refn must be kicking himself
he didn’t have that in his fashion horror-thriller The Neon Demon.
Absolutely Fabulous
is reasonably good fun – although I would have liked to see a
dramatisation of the classic Kate Moss anecdote, doing a
dystopia-chic fashion shoot in a ruined building and being told by a
timid assistant that the only toilets she could use were ones with no
doors. Moss replied: “Well, how am I supposed to get in, then?”
• Absolutely
Fabulous is released in the UK on 1 July, in the US on 22 July and in
Australia on 4 August
Why
Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie is a better fashion satire than
Zoolander 2
It’s got fewer
Hollywood stars and a much lower budget but the sitcom movie nails
fashionista desperation much better than Ben Stiller’s laboured
sequel
Benjamin Lee
Thursday 30 June
2016 12.55 BST
March 2015 saw the
splashy beginning of Zoolander 2’s relentless buzz-building
campaign as stars Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson appeared in character
at Paris fashion week. It was covered extensively by both film and
fashion press, and kicked off an exhaustively well-sustained assault
on anyone with an internet connection all the way through to its
release in February this year.
Some were
trepidatious about this belated big-screen outing for the fashionista
sitcom. In fact, post-referendum, the timing couldn’t be better …
and neither could Joanna Lumley
Read more
Given the first
film’s cult following and how surprisingly well it stands up to
repeat viewings 15 years later, expectations were high for another
quotable combination of well-measured silliness and sharp
fashion-industry satire. But it was a washout, a tiresome and
aggressively unfunny mis-step, the sort of lazy rehash that makes you
question whether you even liked the original.
Five months later
and we have another couple of fictional fashionistas dusted off and
resurrected for those blessed with a good memory. Absolutely
Fabulous: The Movie brings back Patsy and Edina, originally on the
BBC in 1992, and catapults them to the big screen following in the
footsteps of The Inbetweeners and, most recently, Dad’s Army. The
campaign was far more modest, cheap even, and the buzz was notably
less feverish, not helped by the film’s first press screening
taking place just two days before its release.
Yet, against all
odds, it works. The comic timing of Jennifer Saunders and Joanna
Lumley has been curiously underutilised in the years since Ab Fab
went off air, and the film, wonderfully short, scrappy and snappy at
91 minutes, gives them free rein to remind us of their skills. It’s
imperfect (the plot is almost an afterthought), but it’s far
funnier than it should be, given how unnecessary it all seemed on
paper.
The pleasure of
watching the pair drunkenly embarrass themselves across Europe far
outweighs watching Stiller and Wilson uncover new levels of idiocy in
a glossier transatlantic trip. Both films posit their characters as
relics, struggling to keep up with an industry changed irrevocably by
social media and populated with those far younger and sharper. But
Patsy and Edina were always in this mode, obsessed with remaining
current, aware of their sell-by date and failing, miserably, to
succeed in the fashion world. Alternately, Derek and Hansel were,
bizarrely and comically, at the top of their game in the first film,
only to be brought back to earth in the sequel.
When your film
receives a green light on the basis of fan service, you’d be wise
to make sure your most loyal fans are well-served. By changing the
dynamic, we lost the joke of seeing two middle-aged,
above-average-looking men touted as gorgeous supermodels and instead
in the sequel, they ended up playing fortysomething dads failing to
comprehend selfie culture. Ab Fab doesn’t deviate from its original
setup, it merely exaggerates it, an understandable decision given the
increased gap between the leads and the youthful culture they hope to
dominate.
There’s also a
confidence in the characters in Ab Fab thanks to a wealth of
material, 39 episodes in fact, that have proved their longevity and
also the actors’ skill at playing them. Zoolander 2 proved that
Derek and Hansel have less mileage, and despite both films having
largely nonsensical and haphazard plots, only Patsy and Edina manage
to rise above.
The poor box office
of Stiller’s sequel was a sign that the fandom wasn’t as strong
as Paramount had anticipated. On the same budget of $50m, similarly
belated comedy follow-up Anchorman 2 managed to make almost four
times that, while Zoolander 2 just about broke even. Absolutely
Fabulous: The Movie won’t play to huge numbers abroad, but
surprisingly strong reviews and a fanbase that’s stuck around since
the early 90s might make it a modest domestic success. By never
pretending to be in style, Patsy and Edina have remained more
fashionable than Derek and Hansel could have ever dreamed of.
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