Women behaving badly
‘Girls Trip’ uses raunchy comedy to celebrate layers of black sisterhood
(6) GIRLS TRIP. Directed by: Malcolm D Lee. Starring: Regina Hall, Jada Pinkett Smith, Queen Latifah, Tiffany Haddish, Mike Colter, Kate Walsh. Showing at: Baywest, Hemingways. Reviewed by: Robbie Collin.
CALL off the search for the title’s missing apostrophe. The tripping in Girls Trip – in the contemporary “acting irrational” sense – is very much a present-tense activity.
This raunchy comedy follows four formerly close female friends on a no-holds-barred reunion in New Orleans, where individual insecurities work together to bring on a grand collective losing of the plot.
The foursome at its core are the once watertight and self-sustaining “Flossy Posse”, who have been parted since their 1990s heyday by the obligations of adulthood.
But self-help author Ryan (Regina Hall) uses an all-expenses-paid appearance at a New Orleans festival as an excuse to bring the gang back together: gossip blogger Sasha (Queen Latifah), single mother Lisa (Jada Pinkett Smith) and tireless party girl Dina (breakout star Tiffany Haddish).
Arriving in cinemas a week after the release of Christopher Nolan’s
Dunkirk, Girls Trip might look like a simple piece of opportune counter-programming: it is, after all, unlikely to be mistaken for a heart-pounding historical epic about the British Expeditionary Force’s 1940 evacuation of France.
But Malcolm D Lee’s film is also something of a landmark. Even “serious” films centred on black women are something of a rarity: the last to be released in the UK was the space programme period drama Hidden Figures in February.
So for a comedy to unpick African-American female friendship with the same mix of affection and frankness that Todd Phillips’s The Hangover (2009) brought to its quartet of Caucasian dude-bros feels like a boundary-pusher, even when the presentation is as glossy and affable as it is here.
From full-frontal male nudity to absinthe-induced hallucinations via catfights, dance-offs and an occult sexual practice known as “grape-fruiting”, Girls Trip commits to this stuff with a zeal that’s both very funny and liberating to watch.
The material doesn’t always match the energy the cast bring to it – and some gambits go on for longer than they probably should.
Yet throughout the film, there’s a sharp specificity to the women’s various emotional travails that cuts across its occasionally baggy construction.
Sasha’s business is on the verge of going under, while Lisa is caught in a two-year sexual drought.
They seem like underachievers compared with Ryan, whose success as an author is built on her public image as an archetypal resourceful and resilient Strong Black Woman. With her handsome retired sports star husband Stewart (Mike Colter), budding publishing empire and plans for a family somewhere down the line, she’s a textbook case of having it all.
But the life peddled in her books is a fiction: Stewart is cheating on her with an Instagram model (Deborah Ayorinde), and his infidelity could jeopardise an impending talk show deal.
The film doesn’t exactly labour the point amid the booze-propelled chaos, but there’s a gentle suggestion that the glib packaging-up of African-American female culture as a kind of you-go-girl lifestyle concept is anything but healthy.
Like the cringeworthy attempts by Ryan’s white agent (Kate Walsh) to use street slang, some things just shouldn’t be commodified. And while the camaraderie of the Flossy Posse might be raucously imperfect, at least it’s real. – The Telegraph