52 Films by Women Vol 8. 46. Audrey (Director: Natalie Bailey)
Former actress
Ronnie Collins (Jackie Van Beek) is a force of nurture. Embracing smotherhood, the
parent of the title character in the Queensland-set comedy, Audrey, wants her eighteen-year-old daughter to equal her achievement. Audrey (Josephine
Blazier) would rather go to Nepal with her boyfriend, Max (Fraser Anderson) to
build houses and surf, taking advantage of everything her ‘white privilege has
to offer’. She doesn’t appreciate that mum has enrolled her in an acting class
given by a legendary stage director, Lucinda (Gael Ballantyne) who stunned
everyone with ‘her all male version of the Vagina Monologues’. Meanwhile,
Ronnie’s younger daughter, Norah (Hannah Diviney), who has cerebral palsy, is
given little attention. Norah can’t even enter the bathroom in her wheelchair,
one of those jobs that Ronnie’s husband, Cormack (Jeremy Lindsay Taylor) keeps
putting off.
Written by Lou Sanz
and directed by Natalie Bailey, Audrey is a Vegemite comedy: jet black, stains
easily and is of dubious taste. I laughed loudly once, though some of the
twists take it into weary sex comedy territory.
Case in point. Audrey
catches her father in his bedroom masturbating into a rubberised object, which
the dog then grabs. ‘That’s my toy,’ Cormack protests. Audrey takes one bank
note from his wallet to compensate for the trauma and another to keep quiet. The
family dog is then admonished when a piece of fruit falls on the floor. ‘How
many times have I told you not to lick the lemon?’ protests Ronnie.
When the film satirises
the petty narcissism of its characters, it is on firmer ground. Audrey asks her
mother to sign a form to say she has completed her community service. This
involves wheeling her sister around at home. Norah protests. Ronnie capitulates
after Audrey agrees to turn up for an audition. Discovered later by Ronnie in a
car with Max on top of her, Audrey breaks her word.
For reasons I found
too complicated to remember, Audrey ends up on the roof of the family home.
Slates break under her feet. By way of distraction, Ronnie directs her to recite
a speech while her father fetches a ladder. After Cormack puts it in place,
Ronnie climbs up. Only Audrey slips, her fall broken by a lemon tree. She ends
up in a coma.
Ronnie elicits maximum cringe when she arrives at the
hospital, insisting that Audrey will recover in time for her audition. ‘She’s in a coma,’ the doctor tells her. ‘Her
face – is it scarred?’ Ronnie asks, her denial reaching epic proportions.
Audrey’s condition drives
her classmates into sentimental overdrive. They want to perform a vigil,
treating her as if she were dead. Max, who was given Norah’s pills by Audrey,
takes an interest in her younger sister. ‘Why do you take pills?’ Norah asks Max.
‘Because I want each day to be different from the last. Why do you take pills?’
he asks her ‘Because I have cerebral palsy,’ Audrey replies.
Meanwhile Cormack
discovers that he is attracted to Bourke (Aaron Fa’aoso), the mixed-race leader
of a therapy group. Yes, Cormack admits, he likes ‘black coffee’. Bourke hires Cormack
to redecorate the room. Cormack does not pay too much attention when he sees Bourke
wearing a giant plastic fig leaf. Rather, he notices a door. ‘What goes on in there?’ he asks. Bourke
shows him. Cormack then becomes the boom operator for religious themed ‘couples
therapy’ porn movies.
However, as director, Bourke is creatively blocked. He can’t justify what a future saint should do in a hot tub. Cormack solves the problem, resulting in an excuse to say, ‘bring me the head of John the Baptist’. After the day’s shooting, the two men grab each other enthusiastically in a car.
Pictured: Ronnie Collins (Jackie Van Beek) and daughter Audrey (Josephine Blazier) in a scene from the Australian comedy, 'Audrey', written by Lou Sanz and directed by Natalie Bailey. Still courtesy of Rialto Film Distribution (Australia)
Ronnie does not let
a coma stop her from completing Audrey’s in-person enrolment to Lucinda’s
acting class, even if she nearly runs over her idol in the process. Lucinda,
who has never heard of Jillaroo, the show for which Ronnie became famous,
denounces her for having no talent. ‘What if the People’s Choice awards were wrong?’ she asks in a rare moment
of self-doubt, a line that caused me to finally laugh out loud. Complimented by
two Asian shop assistants that she couldn’t possibly be the mother of two teenage
daughters, Ronnie decides to masquerade as Audrey, getting headshots that
suggest she should be cast in roles for 13-to-25-year-olds.
Given the irreverent nature of what has gone before,
Ronnie’s experience of Lucinda’s class is somewhat generic. Lucinda hates her
explanations as to why she enrolled, pronouncing them as boring. When a younger
student says he wants to be famous, Lucinda approves. Ronnie finally bleats, ‘I
want to prove that I’m good.’ Lucinda is delighted. ‘That’s your wound,’ she
coos.
Meanwhile Norah starts fencing lessons and takes part in
dance rehearsals for her sister’s vigil. The whole family is on the up. While Audrey
didn’t show Max how much she loved him, Norah is more obliging.
It’s not just the family who benefit from Audrey’s coma. The
film is much more enjoyable when she’s not around. That said, having typed up his
masterpiece, ‘Cain and Anal’, Cormack slips and drops his laptop in the
swimming pool.
When Audrey recovers, it is a second tragedy. ‘It’s your
sister,’ Norah is told at an after party. ‘She’s awake.’ Max and his friends
snub Norah, claiming that she raped Max. Norah tells Max he’s lying. ‘Victim
shaming,’ one girl says disapprovingly.
Before long, the almost fully recovered Audrey is tinkling a
bell, interrupting Ronnie and Cormack at bedtime. By this time, Cormack and
Bourke are in love. When the family is out buying ice cream, the nature of
their relationship is revealed.
Trees are a recurring motif. Ronnie insists that the lemon tree outside her home tried to kill her daughter. She poisons it with weed killer (‘Kill-All’). In Lucinda’s acting class, Ronnie doesn’t want to be a tree. Lucinda looks at her and declares, ‘I see form but no substance.’ Ronnie explodes. I wondered whether Bailey and Sanz would give the tree a redemptive arc – or bark. When the family dog digs at the lemon tree roots, tragedy strikes. ‘Kill-All’ plays a part in the film’s final act, which involves a ‘murder suicide’ and a performance of Medea in which sheep are shaved, apparently based on a version of the play by Suzie Miller.
The film doesn’t give us a ‘normal’ character who brings the
family back to something like equilibrium. There is no purity of expression
that saves the Lipsicks. Audrey enters a black comedy cul-de-sac
from which no reversal is possible. Families who live theatricality die by it.
Art never justifies having an awful, egotistical personality. This is the
lesson that Bailey and Sanz impart. Their film conflates artistic reinterpretation
of ‘the classics’ with the appropriation of women’s experience by men. A horn
dog like Max can be seen by others as abused, rather than as the abuser that he
is. Women are complicit with this absurdity. Underneath the broad comedy, this
is the film’s most subtle point.
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