AUDREY ★★★½
(MA) 97 minutes
Black humour can encompass many comedic strands, and this Australian feature about a dysfunctional family experiencing an unexpected renaissance successfully hits on nearly all of them. There’s mocking delusion, cruel slights, mordant truths and farcical self-entitlement. Natalie Bailey’s film moves with such unobtrusive momentum that you’re swept up in its subversive mores. Flailing for vindication, the characters do much the same.
Jackie van Beek stars as Ronnie Lipsick, who pretends to be her teenage daughter in the black comedy Audrey.
It’s an average day at her nondescript academy of the performing arts as Ronnie Lipsick (Jackie van Beek) performs a monologue from Monkey Grip to a class of bewildered six-year-olds. A Logie winner in 2004, Ronnie’s acting career was sidetracked by parenthood, so she has channelled all her ambition into her oldest daughter, year 12 student Audrey (Josephine Blazier), a petty tyrant done with acting classes and studying the Greek classics.
“It’s my life,” Audrey insists in a rare moment free of venom. “No, it’s not!” insists Ronnie, who appears to have given up on her sad sack, sexually despondent husband Cormack (Jeremy Lindsay Taylor) and relegated her young daughter, Norah (Hannah Diviney), who has cerebral palsy, to the role of underfunded back-up. Tolstoy’s line about “each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” really resonates in this suburban chaos.
Attentive to each member of this fractured family, Lou Sanz’s screenplay asks how far are you justified in going to find happiness? The answer is quite far. Once Audrey is hospitalised after an act of hubris misfires, her family is liberated. Ronnie can pretend to be Audrey and take her place at a masterclass for teen thespians, Cormack can experience a sexual reawakening working on biblical-themed Christian pornography and Norah can exult in the schoolyard attention of being a martyr’s sibling.
Jackie van Beek in Audrey, a film which commits to going all the way with its darkest impulses.
As with Muriel’s Wedding, one of Audrey’s spiritual predecessors, fulfilment trumps judgment. Their questionable decisions, whether it’s Cormack’s pursuing hunky pastor Bourke (Aaron Fa’aoso) or forty-something Ronnie proudly getting new headshots listing her age range for roles as 13 to 25, actually make them likeable. Their flaws and mishaps are meant to be laughable, but they come from a place of genuine emotional deprivation.
In her feature debut after a productive run directing television here and abroad, Bailey coolly juggles both moods and modes. The masterclass, run by Ronnie’s idol Lucinda Domotrov (Gael Ballantyne), is a satire of dictatorial artists, but it’s everything to a counterfeit student still desperately clinging on to the praise TV Week bestowed on her decades prior. Likewise, along the way, the film is frank and positive about sexual desire and satisfaction, and that extends to Norah.
The narrative dips its toes into a potent horror theme – that motherhood is a vengeful curse – but it never strays too far from its laughs, no matter how bilious they can be. Some black comedies struggle to follow through on their gambits, making do with a belated bestowing of wisdom as a modest finale, but this film thankfully commits to going all the way with its darkest impulses. Ronnie may be a fake, but Audrey definitely is not.
Audrey is released in cinemas on November 7.
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