By Francisco Silva -
Bad people make good comedy. I don’t believe you have to relate with the protagonist to enjoy a film, but if it’s comedy, I’m especially pleased to see the worst of the worst butt heads for my enjoyment. There was nothing approachable about Jerry and Joe, the two protagonists in Some Like It Hot, and yet it’s easy to make a case that that’s the best comedy of all time. But you need a balance. Without it, your film is just a collection of horrible people living in a horrific world. Without tension, comedy doesn’t exist. It’s muted by existing in a universe that doesn’t challenge it. I’m applying my expectations to a world where they’re irrelevant. I’m filling in the gaps that the film should be.
The new Australian comedy Audrey suffers from a lack of understanding of comedy rules. It can break them—no rule is set in stone—but to do it effectively, it has to understand them, and I doubt it does. The film follows the severely dysfunctional Lipsick family centred around the matriarch Ronnie (Jackie van Beek). Once a Logie-winner rising star of Australian film, now a forgotten washed-up nothing planning a comeback and trying to groom her oldest daughter Audrey (Josephine Blazier) to follow her footsteps of stardom, to the detriment of her other teen daughter Norah (Hannah Diviney), a teen with particular needs whose parents don’t even bother to make their house accessible for her wheelchair. And then there’s the father, Cormack (Jeremy Lindsay Taylor), a sexually frustrated bisexual handyman who has lost grasp of his family.
The inciting incident comes when Audrey goes into a coma after a nasty fall, and the whole family finds a newfound breath. Ronnie takes her daughter’s name to try and kickstart her career, Cormack starts a torrid affair with a religious pornographer called Bourke (Aaron Fa’aoso), and Norah receives the attention she deserves and gets to explore her sexuality with Audrey’s boyfriend Max (Fraser Anderson).
The idea is inherently funny. A family where every member is an egocentric moron to the detriment of each other is a terrific framing. Adding a dose of dark humour that never punches down on minorities and feels organic within its universe, it felt that Audrey would be a cult hit for the summer. However, there is no balance between the elements. It’s not that the Lipsicks are awful people; everyone is. The Lipsicks don’t stand out; they live in the world they deserve, as does everyone else. So the comedy quickly gets diluted when the small horrid details of their lives – like the father who constantly forgets to fix a bathroom door so it’s accessible to his daughter in a wheelchair – mean nothing when the two parents decide to have sex next to the comatose body of their other teen daughter. The gravity of their behaviour only works if we apply our morality to it, but if the rest of their world doesn’t, it’s a fruitless exercise.
It’s disappointing when all the cast works hard to deliver. Van Beek deserves to be in a film with Julia Davies so she can explore that terrific bend towards dry, dark humour. Blazier and Diviney have great chemistry and comedic timing. The responsibility here lies strictly on writer Lou Sanz and director Natalie Bailey. Both have an idea of the film they wanted to make, but they didn’t fine-tune the concept to a satisfying conclusion.
To hide these formal imperfections, Audrey makes two egregious aesthetic choices. First, all the dark humour scenes from people outside the family (especially the school kids) feel entirely out of place and redundant. The other is the sheer amount of needle drops, of which not a single one of them works. Not all the Alex Cameron songs, not the Paul Kelly ones. There’s a bizarre moment where a Deerhoof song starts playing, loud and weirdly abrasive for what is supposed to be a joke on Cormack feeling attracted to Bourke. The first time feels alien and disconnected from the scene. The second time makes it look like a weird recurring joke. It doesn’t happen for the third time.
And that encapsulates Audrey‘s problems: It is a collection of good ideas applied with little thought process. It doesn’t have the strength to feel openly punk because its rhythm is that of a generic sitcom but with an edge. They could’ve probably saved money on the music rights to give both writers and directors more time to perfect their craft.
Verdict: 2 out of 5
For fans of dark humor of the Australian flavour, where each delivery is somehow both self-awareness and complete obliviousness. A couple of good chuckles and a genuinely funny cast don’t cover the rest of the film’s shortcomings.
