Lewes Cinema - Mr Bean’s Holiday

When I first saw Mr Bean in 1990 I cried with laughter. By the time the series reached its denouement five years later I decided it had become tired, boring and hackneyed. Mr Bean was a one-gag concept, and the gag had become corny. I didn’t go and see the Hollywood version of the series, ‘Bean’, directed by Mel Smith and starring, as ever, Rowan Atkinson as the increasingly irritating man-child whose lateral way of approaching everyday events in his life was reportedly smeared in an extra veneer of American-audience-aimed saccharine coating. It grossed over 230 million dollars at the box office.

It’s taken the Mr Bean camp ten years to make a sequel. ‘Mr Bean’s Holiday’ is said to be a more European-oriented venture, which sees the hapless tweed-jacketed ingénue winning a trip to the South of France in a local raffle, a journey which throws up a whole new set of slapstick situations, featuring passports, oysters and a digital video camera. The original inspiration for the character was Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot, and the title of the film pays homage to the French actor. Critics were pretty evenly divided in their response: thelondonpaper.com claimed their wasn’t a single funny moment in the whole film; Time Out, on the other hand, decided it offered ‘ample diversion for even the snootiest filmgoer’. At least, after ten Bean-less years, the one-trick pony’s one trick will be fresh to a whole new generation of children. And they didn’t call it ‘French Bean’, as originally intended. DL