Sian Clifford Seizes the Screen in 'Lady', a Mockumentary of Posh Decline

Sian Clifford, BAFTA winner and Emmy nominee for playing Claire in "Fleabag," finally gets a leading role built entirely around her — and she takes it with everything she has. In "Lady," the debut feature from writer-director Samuel Abrahams, she plays Lady Isabella Ravenhyde, an obscenely rich narcissist so eager for her closeup that, as Variety's review puts it, "even Norma Desmond might deem her a bit desperate."

The film is a mockumentary that follows both its batty aristocrat and Sam (Laurie Kynaston), a young, soft-spoken middle-class filmmaker with a short-film BAFTA nomination — though not the win, as he keeps reminding Lady Isabella, who keeps insisting otherwise. His agent pairs him with her after she claims to have a Netflix commission for a bio-doc about her life. That claim is a lie, one of many she tells over the course of the film. She remains convinced that if Sam and his crew simply keep the camera rolling as she swans about her country manor, day-drinking and parading a spectacularly garish wardrobe, the result will be eminently watchable.

A twist the review declines to reveal proves her unexpectedly right. But even without it, her logic holds. She calls herself "aristocracy's answer to the Kardashians," and the comparison is not entirely absurd: if that family became TV-famous on money and an expensive lifestyle alone, why not her? She is more eccentric than any Kardashian, and therefore more interesting — whether shaking up tepid Bloody Marys, barking obtuse demands at her long-suffering maid Becky (Juliet Cowan), or eventually putting the moves on a deeply bemused Sam.

For Clifford, the role inverts a career of team-player turns. Her Claire in "Fleabag" was defined by being the less vivacious, spotlight-seeking sister; recent supporting parts — a dopey sadsack in "The Ballad of Wallis Island" and a featureless publicist in "Mother Mary" — did nothing to change that impression. In "Lady" she is, in the review's words, "boundlessly, dementedly vivacious," attacking the part "with the untethered, vanity-free commitment of an actor who knows she might never again get a part this ripe, this juicy, this big." The performance blends fevered physical comedy, tart line readings and exposed nerves that, "slowly and sneakily, make you feel for her."

The film invites comparisons to Lisa Kudrow's "The Comeback," another doc-within-the-story about a character's hunger to be seen. "Though they speak very different languages of privilege, Lady Isabella and Valerie Cherish would have a lot to talk about," the review notes.

Abrahams, who co-wrote the script with Miranda Campbell Bowling, fills it with elegantly pithy quips and throwaway gags strung on a slender storyline that, even by Lady Isabella's flighty standards, makes little sense. Her fixation on winning a low-rent regional talent contest goes unexplained — though it gives Clifford a platform to perform loopy modern dance in an oversized crow costume.

Behind the camera, Terri Higgins' costume design is witty and instantly character-shaping, and Josh Mallalieu's jagged, agitated editing keeps the documentary pretense afloat. The film, Variety argues, skewers not only the English elite but also "a media landscape that has led elites like Lady Isabella to believe that they're stars, practically by birthright" — a target that looks more absurd than ever amid continued social inequality in the U.K.

"Lady" may be a one-joke enterprise, the review concedes, but Clifford's fully possessed performance single-handedly answers the question of why we're watching.