Zero change, lots of Champagne: Absolutely Fabulous is just what fans want

The Reelist is a column featuring Kristen Page-Kirby’s musings on movies. To read Washington Post film critic Stephanie Merry’s review of “Absolutely Fabulous,” click here.

I don’t like when stuff from my childhood or adolescence changes. A heartrending example is the yearly summer pilgrimage my family would make to Wichita, Kan., where we sought two things: a visit with my grandmother and a stop at Taco Grande, my father’s favorite fast-food Mexican place.

So it was sad when we arrived one year to find that this Taco Bell wannabe had entered its final siesta (in later years we found another branch/incarnation at a gas station across town, but Dad dismissed it because I guess he had some standards). It was heartbreak that no Double Sancho, Dad’s usual order, could mend.

So it was with trepidation that I approached “Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie.” I consumed the original British sitcom in mass quantities when I was in high school, thanks to Comedy Central playing it on a seemingly unending loop and a mother who didn’t know just how much cocaine Patsy (Joanna Lumley) consumed. More snow went up her nose in one episode than appeared on an entire season of “Fargo.” [Rim shot!] Would it hold up? Would I still find it funny? If Taco Grande could disappear, nothing is safe from change!

Advertisement

It is, I am pleased to report, exactly the same “Ab Fab.” Eerily so. While the secondary cast members look like they’ve lived the 24 years since the show’s debut in the traditional linear fashion, Jennifer Saunders (as Edina) and Lumley barely seem to have aged at all, like they’re being shot through some magical Snapchat anti-aging filter. Moreover (and more reassuringly), Patsy and Edina haven’t changed one single bit. They are narcissistic, insufferable addicts, with Patsy still sniffing and swilling and Edina still stuffing herself into juuuust-too-small outfits that are as ridiculously expensive as they are just plain ridiculous. They have learned nothing. They have achieved nothing. Bollinger is still their preferred Champagne. There have been no moments of self-realization. They are still the center of their own absurd, luxuriously appointed world. Thank GOD.

I love movies that push the limits of what film can do. Most of the time, I want new, I want surprising, I want fresh. But sometimes I just want to crawl into nostalgia for a bit and live back there and then, when my biggest worry was whether my sister would take my seat when I got up to pee even though I had CLEARLY called seatbacks. People who aren’t fans of “Absolutely Fabulous” probably shouldn’t see the movie. But for those of us who are fans, it is a big, comforting bite of an off-brand fast-food burrito.

More Reelists from Kristen Page-Kirby

He’s not a loser just because he hates the female ‘Ghostbusters’

The gas in ‘Swiss Army Man’ is more than just hot air

‘The Fits’ owes its powerful message about black girlhood to simply asking ‘what if?’

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLK5vNGeqqxnp6V8c3yQb2Zpb19nf3DGxKumZpuYlruosYylpq2rXaSzbq%2FHmqSpmZejsm6twaympa2kmrm6ecWama6kn6rAbrXSZqGuq6RixKmt02admqajYsSiutNo