3 hours ago
3
Those of us pining for Sian Clifford since the end of Fleabag, in which she played Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s fierce sister, have been rewarded with an outrageous barnstormer in this bizarre mockumentary comedy, a feature debut for director Samuel Abrahams. Clifford plays haughty but troubled aristocrat Lady Isabella who welcomes a young film-maker into her gorgeous country estate (filmed at Somerleyton Hall in Suffolk) with calamitous results, and the film plays like a scuzzier, shroomier B-side to Saltburn. Maybe it’s a bit reliant on Clifford’s overwhelming firepower of performance, and we have to indulge the way it cheats strict mockumentary rules about how exactly the camera comes to be where it is at every moment. But there are laughs and unexpected tenderness in this very peculiar sentimental education.
Laurie Kynaston plays Sam, a pushy, insecure young director who shows up at the stately home with his crew, excited at the prospect of shooting a candid documentary study, but disconcerted by the distrait behaviour and patrician mannerisms of the chatelaine, Lady Isabella. Describing herself as “aristocracy’s answer to the Kardashians”, she hosts and judges the annual talent show Stately Stars for local children. Yearning for her own artistic vocation to be respected, Lady Isabella now wishes to compete against the youngsters herself, with a vast, complex multimedia performance-installation piece which includes poetry, action painting and photographs of her apparently dead body around the grounds. Juliet Cowan is a put-upon housekeeper who is unsure whether to address her employer as “milady”.
With the gloating cruelty of a born documentarian, Sam is secretly thrilled at this extraordinary story which has fallen into his lap; he can use her for a blend of Sunset Boulevard and Grey Gardens. For her part, and with a predatory cunning to match his, Lady Isabella picks up on Sam’s own anxieties and sexual inexperience, although sometimes she misjudges the mood. She sensually drinks a huge glass of milk in front of him, but Sam’s dairy intolerance means he has to run out to be sick; Lady Isabella shouts petulantly after him: “Since when is milk not sexy?”
What complicates the whole situation is Lady Isabella’s own central complaint: as both a woman and an artist, she isn’t being seen. Perimenopause makes her invisible and she hasn’t had the artistic recognition that she regards as another of the many things to which she is entitled. As she angrily says to Sam during one of their tiffs, she is not self-obsessed, she is self-centred, because an artist explores and develops the self. There is of course something Brent-Partridgean about Isabella’s delusions, and yet gender takes it away from this template; the film’s poignancy and magic realist meltdowns give Lady Isabella her own exotic charm.
