Robbie Collin on the feel-good film of the summer
Absolutely Fabulous: the Movie 15 cert, 90 min
Mandie Fletcher Jennifer Saunders, Joanna Lumley, Julia Sawalha, June Whitfield, Jane Horrocks, Kathy Burke, Celia Imrie, Chris Colfer
Was Absolutely Fabulous of its time, or blazingly ahead of it? These days in the British sitcom pantheon it’s a comebacks-and-charity-specials case – now with its own obligatory spin-off film, which had its premiere last night in London’s Leicester Square. But during its original run from 1992 to 1996, Ab Fab was something weirder and spikier – an absurd fashion-industry satire which belonged neither to the Thatcher years that preceded it, nor the Cool Britannia era that followed.
Its lead characters – hapless fashion PR Edina Monsoon (Jennifer Saunders) and her basilisk-like hanger-on Patsy Stone (Joanna Lumley) – weren’t just rare female voices in a male-colonised comedy landscape. They were the kind of leaking, spluttering, booze-engorged comic grotesques women just didn’t
play. The show was first broadcast when I was 10 years old, and I remember thinking: these women
aren’t just funny or outrageous, they’re scary.
But the show’s nerve seemed to falter further with every comeback, relying on cameos and increasingly clubby humour. That meant Saunders had to make an important choice: either cash in on stockpiled nostalgia, or wrench her creation back to its first principles.
The film, written by Saunders and directed by Mandie Fletcher, charts a safe but satisfying course between the two. The endless show-business cameos threatened in the trailer (both returning characters and asthemselves celebs) are every bit as wincingly ingratiating as expected – though there’s something admirable about a film that can somehow get Jean-Paul Gaultier and Janette Krankie on screen within five minutes of each other. Fortunately, this stuff is mostly confined to party set-pieces on the film’s fringes. The Botox-pumped meat of the thing is all Eddy and Patsy.
Early on, the plot becomes a distraction you wish the film could somehow escape. The supermodel Kate Moss is looking for a new PR firm and, in Eddy’s desperation to talk to her at a riverside party, she knocks Moss off a balcony and into the Thames. (The fall itself looks like a horribly airbrushed composite shot.) This becomes a media scandal – but not quite enough to kickstart the film’s second act. So in comes a separate thread about Eddy running out of money. Cue a trip to Cannes, where Patsy hopes to track down and snare one of her wealthy ex-beaus. Like the writers of almost every British sitcom movie ever, Saunders sends the characters on holiday.
But with these two, it works – largely because once they’re over there, the film shakes off its shape and defaults to a series of capers. And while it’s lots of fun to see Saunders back in character – the bumbling and malapropisms still prompt teeth-gnashing laughs – it’s Lumley who sinks her fangs into the task at hand like it’s so much blue steak. A contretemps between Patsy and Rebel Wilson’s air hostess is a lovely, match-meeting moment, while a later skit in which Patsy drags up as a man feels joyously transgressive – not least because Lumley is gorgeous in a tuxedo and pencil moustache.
The production values are still resolutely sitcom standard: continuity-wise, there’s a scene with Jon Hamm in which after every cut, his hair looks like it’s rotated a little on top of his head. But while you can’t imagine the film ever making it to Cannes under anything other than its own steam, the jaunt proves to be a surprisingly rewarding one.
‘They were the kind of leaking, spluttering, booze-engorged comic grotesques women just didn’t play’