Writer: Lou Sanz
Director: Natalie Bailey
Showing in the Laugh strand of the BFI London Film Festival, Lou Sanz’s story of an obsessive stage mum stealing her daughter’s identity is never quite as funny as it really wants to be. Aiming for that slightly absurdist Kath and Kim black humour, Audrey, directed by Natalie Bailey, has several (not all relevant) plot strands and a stretched premise which over 100-minutes struggles to sustain enough storyline, or quite enough jokes to make this Australian comedy really sparkle.
Spoiled teen Audrey is on the cusp of a training place with a renowned theatre director when she tumbles off the roof of the family home and ends up in a coma. Desperate to retain her spot, her former soap star mother pretends to be her daughter temporarily but rediscovers her love of performance. Meanwhile, the rest of the family discover a new contentment without Audrey’s caustic presence.
There are some entertaining moments in Sanz and Bailey’s otherwise so-so comedy, particularly the pastiche of overly serious stage actors and the often silly exercises that Ronnie (Audrey’s mum) has to perform in her place. The central premise too is a strong one, the idea of a family coming to life without the presence of an energy-draining member, and those tonal shifts managed via montage and slight alterations in colour washing and tone, are a lovely contrast with the domestic mundanity and low level resentment of each other that boils through the rest of the film.
Bur Audrey has too many off-shoots, digressions that are either over-egged or ultimately add very little to the set-up of jokes, their payoff or the plot. One of the most poorly served is Audrey’s father Cormack who becomes attracted to a local Christian pornographer – hence some crass innuendo – and is drawn into the world of filming for a time. It is used to revivify his marriage but the scenario lacks purpose and consequence. The decision to include panto versions of scenes being shot requires female actors to appear bare breasted while the men are all artfully concealed. In a film that doesn’t require any nudity whatsoever, it is tiresome and exploitative.
Performances are big and bold, with Jackie van Beek’s Ronnie holding it all together as the driving force, happily rediscovering herself. Van Beek has good comic timing and gets the tone right even as the film is shifting around her. Josephine Blazier’s Audrey is rather one-note, sometimes too shrill to make her dialogue audible but certainly becomes a convincing nexus point for the family woes while Hannah Diviney gives an enjoyably deadpan performance as her unimpressed sister.
But for Audrey, the jokes fail to land as often and as consistently as you might hope, never quite reaching the promise of its concept or fully lampooning the desperation of the stage mother character.
Audrey is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2024.
