Lady
It is a huge and unexpected opportunity for documentary director Samuel Abrahams, his agent contacting him to say that Netflix would like him, BAFTA nominated but still early in his career, to assemble a team and spend time in the company of Lady Isabella Ravenhyde at her expansive estate on the Norfolk coast to assemble footage to depict her life and her unique art.
Sam accustomed to high profile clientele and non-disclosure agreements, what he finds is not what he anticipated, Lady Isabella the epitome of a great British eccentric as might be expected of the gentry living in privileged isolation with only a single housekeeper to bully but the specifics of the brief given to him at odds with the expressly stated expectations of the lady of the house.
A satirical mockumentary of “the aristocracy’s answer to the Kardashians,” Lady is directed by Samuel Abrahams starring The Ballad of Wallis Island’s Sian Clifford as Isabella, “a beautiful princess in an enormous castle” whose interests are art and underprivileged children but seems to have no aptitude for the former or connection with the latter, serving pigeon pie to her documenter and unable to find an ice bucket in any of her many kitchens.
Any objectivity between director and subject quickly abandoned, Sam (The Sandman’s Laurie Kynaston) as incredulous as his largely unseen colleagues on camera and sound at the ego and disconnect from any sense of reality of Lady Isabella, organising a talent show for children which she intends to enter herself, bribery in the form of direct funding of the project and her intimate personal attention sway his opinions.
Shot in the suitably prestigious house and grounds of Somerleyton, Lady is very much a one-joke film, occasionally funny but increasingly tired as it rotates through hats, costumes and pretentious performance art pieces, Abrahams’ script requiring complexity beyond the tiresome superficial, the problem being that despite Clifford’s resolve Isabella has little depth beyond a screaming friendless entitled agoraphobic.
Needing attention and validation in order to exist and fading from the world as she drifts into obscurity, the sole idea which might offer an unusual direction is not developed into anything other than an obvious conclusion, Isabella never more than an unsympathetic caricature despite the maudlin attempt to reinvent her through tragedy, The Sarah Jane Adventures’ Juliet Cowan more believable despite having less to work with as understairs underling Becky.
Lady is available on digital download now
