Starring: Jennifer Saunders, Joanna Lumley, Julia Sawalha, June Whitfield, Jane Horrocks, Barry Humphries, and Kate Moss
Distributor: Twentieth Century Fox
Runtime: 91 mins. Reviewed in Aug 2016
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This British comedy is based on the popular television series, “Absolutely Fabulous”, that was based in turn on a 1990 sketch of the same name by Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders. That sketch spawned a famous television BBC series which was revised in the early 2000s for Australian audiences.
This is the first feature length film of “Absolutely Fabulous” and it plays with the original cast. The lasting friendship between the two main players (Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley) lies at the heart of the popular television series, and is the thrust of the film’s comic appeal.
Self-indulgent PR fashion expert, Edina Monsoon (Saunders), and her long-time friend, magazine Editor and former model, Patsy Stone (Lumley) are aware that they are growing old, and clearly don’t like it. However, they go on living the high life of shopping, drinking, and clubbing in the trendiest places they can find. Their wasteful lifestyle, however, is beginning to take its toll. Eddy’s PR agency is at crisis point. It is losing money, and no one is interested in it any longer. Eddy decides she has to try and recruit a supermodel like Kate Moss in order to save her company and her reputation.
Eddy and Patsy go to a high fashion event which Kate Moss is attending. Eddy accidentally bumps Moss after they arrive, and she falls over the balcony into the river Thames below. Everyone believes Eddy has killed Moss, and Patsy and Eddy flee, followed by the police, to the south of France where they hide in the playgrounds of the super-rich. Patsy loses her job for being associated with Eddy; Kate Moss eventually reappears; and Moss joins Eddy’s agency.
Moss is even more famous than before, now that she has been found, and everything is resolved happily to the point where one seriously thinks that ends it all. But a sequel is being planned.
The movie’s plot is scatty and complex. At one stage, as the movie winds to its conclusion, Patsy marries a man who is pretending to be a woman, while she is pretending to be a man. Patsy’ ex-lover is the billionaire, Charlie (Barry Humphries), and the world’s richest woman (who is a man) marries Patsy. Jane Horrocks who was in the original series, plays Bubble, Eddy’s crazy assistant, and Julia Sawalha continues to play Eddy’s sensible daughter, Saffy. who stays sensible.
The subtleties of the movies’s chaotic plot don’t matter. All things happen simply to provide a range of different situations, with slapstick appeal, offering multiple opportunities for comic effect. Some achieve their intended impact, and some miss, such as multiple scenes showing the results of lip injections that have gone wrong. Throughout, there is an army of celebrity cameo performances. These include Lulu, Kate Moss, Celia Imrie, Joan Collins, Dawn French, Jerry Hall, Rebel Wilson, “Dame Edna Everage”, and Kylie Minogue singing the movie to its conclusion. The film adds to the PR dazzle in whatever way it can, and a multitude of drag queens appear all through the movie.
This is a superficial film that aims to be nothing other than that, and which attempts to capture nostalgically the appeal of the original series, with numerous cameos thrown in just in case the nostalgia misses. For fans of the original series, the film offers more of the same. It adds no deep meaning or development of character. It stays moderately (but not entirely) clear of serious comment on ageing, or biting satire on the media and super-stardom. It entertains mostly by providing “comedic chic” with two great comediennes carrying the thrust, just as they have done so well before.
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