What 'a' Is a British Sitcom Starring Jennifer Saunders as Fashion Stylist Edina?
Admittedly Fabulous and the Curse of the Endless Party
Over its two-decade history, the British comedy has made an cool comic spectacle out of the inevitability of women aging.
The 1990s were something of a golden decade for portrayals of women segueing angstily into middle age, Smirnoff bottle in one hand, self-assist volume in the other. In 1995, CBS premiered Cybill, a zingy sitcom starring Cybill Shepherd as a twice-divorced actress facing the twilight of her mediocre Hollywood career with the help of her best friend Maryann (Christine Baranski), a fabulously wealthy, comically drunken divorcee. In 1996, Helen Fielding published Bridget Jones's Diary, the beginning-person account of a hapless, luckless xxx-something who subsists on Chardonnay, Marlboro Lights, and cheese while pratfalling from one public shaming to some other. Merely before either of those, all the mode dorsum in 1992, in that location was Absolutely Fabulous.
The BBC sitcom started life every bit a skit called "Mod Mother and Daughter" on French and Saunders, a comedy sketch show, with Jennifer Saunders playing a middle-aged woman who acted like a teenager and Dawn French playing her teenage girl, forced by her mother's emotional and fiscal immaturity to be the grown upwardly. This evolved into the start six-episode season of AbFab. It was written past Saunders, who played Edina Monsoon, a needy and pathologically shallow PR professional incessantly making a fool of herself alongside her best friend Patsy (Joanna Lumley), an impossibly glamorous fashion editor who too appeared to be an alcoholic and drug-addicted vagrant. Julia Sawalha now played Edina'due south teenage girl, a frumpy, stolid 16-twelvemonth-old whose denunciations of her mother ("y'all've been getting dressed for three hours and you still look like a swollen citrus fruit") became one of the highlights of the testify.
At the core of Absolutely Fabled was a paradox. On the one hand, the show skewered all the societal pressure on women to exist desirable, fashionable, and, in a higher place all, young. On the other, its comedy was entirely based on audiences finding Edina pathetic, nasty, and redundant. The first-flavor episode "Fat" revolves around Eddy's increasingly desperate and ridiculous attempts to lose a large amount of weight in a calendar week; the same season featured "Altogether," substantially a 30-minute tantrum thrown past Edina over the idea of turning 40. Equally the show connected, popping up simply intermittently between 1996 and 2012 with revivals and Christmas specials and ceremony episodes, Edina only got older, and more desperate. The new film Absolutely Fabulous finds her facing 60 or thereabouts, still falling plastered out of taxis, and sadder than ever. All she ever wanted, she cries, is "to not be fatty and old, and to keep the party going."
The concept of aging incapably has been a recurring theme throughout Saunders'southward career. Her earliest comedy act, with French, when the two were in their 20s, was chosen the Menopause Sisters. In 2001, a flavour-four episode of AbFab titled "Menopause" revolved effectually Edina facing career disgrace, Patsy being diagnosed with osteoporosis, and Saffron organizing a menopause back up group coming together in Edina's home to endeavour and make the ii face their future with dignity. "My proper noun is Jobo, and I'm happy to be having the menopause, " one adult female declares. "I have hot flushes, and memory loss, and sometimes when I sneeze, I pee." Patsy raises her hand and counters, "Patsy Stone, I promise y'all're wearing thick underpants." Edina furiously urges everyone to sit down on blackness plastic trash bags so they won't ruin the furniture. For more than than two decades on the air, the testify was clear: The prospect of getting old was hilariously mockable; the only thing funnier was refusing to do then.
Absolutely Fabled the movie is no more than substantial in plot than many of the prove's 30-minute episodes. Edina, facing career failure as usual and desperate to sign a new high-profile customer, gets discussion from Patsy that Kate Moss is looking for a new PR person (English-speak for publicist). Edina and Patsy blitz to a party where Moss is in attendance, but with her typical clumsiness and maladroit posturing, she accidentally pushes the supermodel into the River Thames. A festival of national mourning begins in Britain, and Edina is arrested for attempted murder. But worse for her than the prospect of going to prison is the fact that she'southward suddenly a pariah, "fatty and old and hated and nothing."
In its showtime 30 minutes or so, Absolutely Fabulous feels like a render to form. The physical comedy of watching Eddy and Patsy, admittedly trollied, tumble down staircases and fall on their faces is always funnier than it should be; meanwhile AbFab is sharper than always on the vampiric nature of the quest for youth. Waking upward, Patsy injects Botox into her face while Edina puts on her makeup. At a political party attended past London's fashion glitterati, bystanders discuss the diverse anti-aging merits of toddler blood and fetus stem cells. There's an odd parade of cameos from Information technology Girls, fashion industry names, actual stars, and C-list celebrities: Jourdan Dunn, Lulu, Emma Bunton, Stella McCartney, Gwendoline Christie ("information technology's Brienne of Tarth!" Saffron'south daughter exclaims), Jerry Hall, Janette Tough (in i of the film's more dubious moments, the white actress plays an Asian style designer), Jon Hamm, and the perpetual Christopher Biggins.
Then, things go awry. The direction, by Mandie Fletcher, lacks precision, and much of AbFab'due south humour feels stuck in the 20th century—jokes well-nigh Edina's granddaughter beingness more valuable to her considering she'south mixed race, gags about having to be dainty to transgender people now. Consumption is more than conspicuous than ever. Although Edina is, by all accounts, a personal and professional catastrophe, she now lives in a cavernous West London mansion with an indoor pool that feels better suited to an oligarch laundering rubles. Eddy somehow manages to escape to the due south of France with Patsy, her granddaughter Lola (Indeyarna Donaldson-Holness), and Lola'due south credit card, and it's at that place that both the movie and its stars are forced to face to the reality of their circumstances.
Ane of the most striking scenes comes toward the end, when Eddy and Patsy attend a party on the French Riviera in search of a wealthy pornographer who one time promised Patsy she was the only woman he'd ever ally. Inside a hotel, elderly women dance together, laughing, and having genteel fun. Outside, all the assembled men are on the terrace, frantically bobbing their heads to electronic dance music while a group of ravenous-looking Eastern European models prowls around them. Boil and Patsy, too "young" for the first political party, and far also former for the other, accept nowhere to go. Society has sidelined them.
Writing for The Spectator recently, Tanya Gold criticized Absolutely Fabulous every bit a remarkably malicious portrait of female person failure. "You never meet Boil doing anything functional," she writes. "You see just the chaos that she lives in; the fear she has of herself; the self-disgust that is the comic engine of Ab Fab. Eddy loathes her torso—its bumps, its excrescences, its leaks—with a terror and commitment which, while no doubt familiar to female viewers who plough to the Daily Mail for like torment, is pitiless."
I won't spoil the movie'southward ending, merely its twist is surprisingly gratifying. Later on everything—almost 25 years worth of parties and excoriation and shame and hangovers and never feeling good enough or young enough or thin enough—Boil and Patsy seem to finally find validation in unexpected quarters. There'southward a besides-neat, entertainment-mandated deus ex machina quality to it, but there'due south also a sense that female friendship and support is what'south kept them going all these years. Information technology would be a tidy way for Absolutely Fabled to wrap upwards forever; a glimmer of grace and dignity for the ii most degraded fashion victims culture has ever served up. Simply it won't be the end, of class. Office of the joy and expletive of being a woman aging disgracefully is that the party never stops.
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