The ladies are living it up
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 Nineties heyday by the obligations of adulthood. But self-help author Ryan (Regina Hall) uses an all-expenses-paid appearance at a festival as an excuse to bring the gang back together: blogger Sasha (Queen Latifah), single mother Lisa (Jada Pinkett Smith) and tireless party girl Dina (breakout star Tiffany Haddish).
For a comedy to unpick Africanamerican female friendship with the same 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 as it is here. From full-frontal male nudity to absinthe-induced hallucinations via catfights and dance-offs, Girls Trip commits to this stuff with a zeal that’s very funny and liberating to watch.
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 to Ryan, who is literally a textbook case of having it all. But the life peddled in her books is a fiction: her husband is cheating on her, and his infidelity – unearthed by one of Sasha’s paparazzi contacts – 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. And while the camaraderie of the Flossy Posse might be raucously imperfect, at least it’s real. RC