Jackie van Beek plays a former Logie winner who pretends to be her teenage daughter in a black comedy that counts Muriel’s Wedding as a spiritual predecessor.
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.) performs a monologue fromto 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 , 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 and relegated her young daughter, Norah , who has cerebral palsy, to the role of under-funded 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.
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 , is a satire of dictatorial artists, but it’s everything to a counterfeit student still desperately clinging on to the praisebestowed on her decades prior. Likewise, along the way, the film is frank and positive about sexual desire and satisfaction, and that extends to Norah.
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