The white boomer rebel is a farce.
Photo: Fox Searchlight Pictures/BBC Films
The Absolutely Fabulous movie has been out for three weeks, and is now entering the end of its cinema run. Thank God.
I have the dubious pleasure of working in an independent cinema. Our clients are a bit old, and the movies we play are pretty bougie, but it’s a nice part-time job for the most part.
Except when AbFab hit. It brought a horde of middle-aged ladies and beleaguered husbands into our cinema, which is good because we live in a capitalist system and the business needs to survive.
But also, they were rude as shit and now I hate AbFab. Which is a shame, because although I never watched the sitcom religiously, I saw a few reruns in my teens and thought it was mildly amusing. Joanna Lumley as the bequiffed, hysterical Patsy Stone is particularly great, and I identified with too many cigarettes and glasses of wine with my gal pals.
I hate-watched the film last night, and it was as the reviews said: it was all in-jokes and celebrity cameos and nods to the original fanbase. Aside from some interesting jokes about the feminine fear of aging, it was about as deep as some spilt Lindauer on a tasteful marble floor.
Given the cult status of the TV show, I spent some time thinking that perhaps the shallowness of the film was the point, like Spring Breakers, but I don’t think so somehow. There's something about a lack of James Franco with a phallus-gun in his mouth.
I think the movie is so stretched and tired because most of their schtick - drinking only bubbles, dressing ugly but expensive, and being rude - is no longer very funny in 2016. In 1992, when the show started, poking at material excess after the sparkling, greedy 1980s was pretty fresh, and ladies being frank and funny about self-destructive behaviour spoke to a cultural moment that Sex & The City also profited from.
The women who laughed and cried with Carrie and co. also rolled out of the suburbs in droves for the dreadful Sex & the City 2 in 2010, which made close to US$300m at the box office. Aside from being hamfistedly racist, the opulence and excess on display was received by some as insulting.
In 2016, the rich white female rebel who rebels against...what? Polite convention? It’s no longer revolutionary, if it ever was. These ladies aren’t your feminist heroes.
In New Zealand, a developed country, we are worrying about not having enough homes to put young children in. And you swarm to the cinema to celebrate two women who would gladly drop thousands on a single outfit, if not a single shoe? That’s gross now.
AbFab’s two leads are surrounded by markers of wealth - yes, the bloody bubbles - that betray the power they do hold as rich white women, despite the show’s framing of them as hapless old hags. Satire is not really that effective when it comes from the powerful and is directed at the slightly more powerful. From the bottom, all those rich white people tend to look the same.
And if one more bougie lady rolls her eyes at me because yes, we’ve run out of champagne flutes after serving 200-odd of her mates, she can drink it off her dress.