Starring: Rowan Atkinson, Emma De Caunes, Willem Dafoe and Max Baldry
Director: Steve Bendelack
Rated: PG
COMEDY comes in many forms, from black comedy and satire, to slapstick and farce.
Most popular are the clowns, whose behaviour releases the child in all of us.
Rowan Atkinson’s Mr Bean is hugely popular because he is a gross parody of this secret self, and while Bean can be winsomely endearing (in bed with his teddy, for instance), he is most like us when he gleefully gets his own way, or his best intentions backfire, and he is forced to skedaddle.
Despite the commercial success of the first Mr Bean movie, Bean (1997), which was scripted by Atkinson and won new audiences for his dysfunctional alter ego worldwide, this foray into cinema lacked the gags and zany logic of Mr Bean’s embarrassing behaviour that made the half-hour Mr Bean series such addictive viewing when it first appeared on British television in 1990.
Mr Bean’s Holiday, on the other hand, which owes more than a little something to Jacques Tati’s vintage classic Monsiuer Hulot’s Holiday, has a far more entertaining storyline, and is better paced.
Mr Bean’s Holiday begins with Bean winning a hotly contested trip to the French Riviera at a church raffle, and it is this notion of a journey from rainy England to sunny France that provides the structure for a string of cleverly conceived visual gags and mishaps, all held together by the joke that Mr Bean can only reach his destination by the most circuitous route.
Bean begins his holiday by boarding the Eurostar train to Paris and, on arrival, steps immediately into someone else’s taxi, which takes him to the wrong station.
Unfussed, and all the time filming himself with a video camera also won as part of his prize, Bean sets his compass in the direction of the Gare de Lyon, and reaches it in no time at all by walking like an automaton over the tops of cars, leaving traffic chaos in his wake throughout Paris.
Having missed the Cannes train, Bean then walks into the nearest restaurant for a snack.
This is a posh and expensive eatery which has French character actor Jean Rochfort playing a bemused but polite maitre d’, who presents Mr Bean with an enormous platter of prawns and lobsters.
What follows is predictably hilarious, and reminiscent of one of the funniest television episodes, which has Mr Bean inadvertently ordering steak tartare (raw meat).
On the platform, Mr Bean then asks a Russian man, Emil (Karel Roden), to film him boarding the train.
In the process, the Russian misses the train which is carrying his young son, Stepan (Max Baldry), now unaccompanied, to Cannes.
Mr Bean is mortified and it is his desperate attempt to unite the son with his father, a famous director and jury member on his way to attend the Cannes Film Festival, that precipitates all Mr Bean’s subsequent adventures.
These include cycling after a chicken truck through the French countryside in an attempt to retrieve his train ticket, brief stints by Bean as a busker and as an extra on the set of a yoghurt commercial, and his meeting with Sabine, a beautiful waitress and aspiring actor, whose debut in a film premiering in Cannes brings Bean into close contact with the egocentric American art house director, Carson Clay (Willem Dafoe).
The great pleasure in Mr Bean’s Holiday is not simply Atkinson’s mastery over his character, the streamlined story set in Cannes as a homage to film-making, or the pacey direction of Steve Bendalack (the director behind the success of such television shows as Little Britain and French and Saunders).
Mr Bean is modelled in part on Tati’s Monsieur Hulot, in particular his feyness, muteness, and propensity to create mayhem.
But Bean’s muffled grunts, smug self-satisfaction, and strange appearance have made him over time, and in this film in particular, a totally singular, likeable alien, who children of all ages can identify with.
