IT IS ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS
Edina and Patsy on the big screen
Absolutely Fabulous is a British sitcom that began so long ago, Margaret Thatcher had only just left office. Yet the series has had an on-again, off-again run, resulting in a mere 39 episodes spread over 24 years. (The Simpsons churned out more than 500 in that span.)
And woe betide anyone who wanders into its big-screen version without a thorough grounding in the show. The antics of Edina Monsoon (Jennifer Saunders, who also wrote the film) and Patsy Stone (Joanna Lumley) will strike such viewers as absolutely incomprehensible. Not that they’re that hard to get a handle on. Patsy is a magazine editor/ hanger-on who survived the ’60s and continues to thrive on a diet of cigarettes and booze — when proper alcohol can’t be found, Chanel No. 5 will do. She may also possibly be a vampire, a notion the script merely flirts with and then wisely leaves alone. (Sequel potential?)
Edina is a PR maven, although past-maven might be a better moniker. As far as the film’s plot is driven at all, it is by Edina’s need to secure a new client. She sets her sights on Kate Moss, gamely played by Moss herself.
Unfortunately, bad things can happen when you set your sights on someone. Edina becomes the prime suspect in an attack on the model, and she and Patsy are forced to flee to the rest of Europe, as it will soon be known in Britain. They choose Cannes, France, for its climate and ready access to millionaires.
Fans of Ab Fab will recall the series’ stable of secondary characters, and its habit of inserting real-life celebrities into the mix. Both are continued on the big screen, with Julia Sawalha returning as Edina’s long-suffering daughter, now with a child of her own (Indeyarna DonaldsonHolness); and Jane Horrocks as her personal assistant, Bubble.
On the celebrity front, it might be quicker to say who’s not in Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie. But suffice to say that Stella McCartney, Graham Norton, Dame Edna and Gwendoline Christie (Captain Phasma!) are the mere tip of the luminary iceberg.
The film has some thematic overlaps with the recent (poorly received) Zoolander 2, but whereas Zoolander tried to spoof the fashion industry as a whole, Ab Fab contents itself with — and works best when — mocking the very specific characters of Edina and Patsy: social outliers trying to navigate and profit from the admittedly bizarre world of fame and fortune.
Many of their foils play their roles straight, as when a book editor (Mark Gatiss), tells Edina that her autobiography, Edina Monsoon: A Fabulous Life, is unprintable. This is partly because her life might have been a fun existence but wouldn’t make a very good read; and partly because Bubble, who took down her dictation, filled most of the pages with “blah blah blah.”
That’s how much of the audience might hear what rolls off the screen. Fans and completists (you know who you are, darlings), should be running down the road to catch it quickly. Because this wheel shall explode!