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The comedy “Be Quiet” proves that black humor is alive

One day in the middle of the last century, a nice British housewife, in an advanced stage of pregnancy, was traveling on a train, carefully reading an article in the magazine “Country Life” “An ideal home for an ideal family.” Meanwhile, her suitcases in the baggage car were bleeding. At the final station, the lady easily and without remorse admitted to the police who arrived that the unfaithful husband and his mistress were packed in her luggage - this is how she solved an unpleasant problem for herself. “I couldn’t sit idly by,” she later smiles sweetly at the doctors and judges. 40-odd years flew by unnoticed. And in the family of the village vicar, where not everything is going well, a cheerful old woman with a decisive profile and an indestructible spirit of Hogwarts (Honored Lady of Britain Maggie Smith, now better known as Professor McGonagall from Harry Potter) appears as a housekeeper.

The father of the family (Rowan Atkinson, whose Mr. Bean inevitably creeps out of all his other roles) is bogged down in composing boring sermons and talking with annoying Methuselah-age parishioners about terrible intrigues in the “flower committee.” His mind and will were completely paralyzed by the thought of the inaugural lecture that he was to give at the church congress, and its incomprehensible theme about the inscrutable ways of God. The mother of the family (the shy beauty Kristin Scott Thomas), deprived of his male attention, awkwardly tries to get into trouble with a visiting American golf coach (Patrick Swayze, playing a man who thinks he looks like Patrick Swayze). The eldest daughter, at the age of 17, is such a blackbird that no one in the family has time to learn the name of her next boyfriend. And the youngest son grows up to be a shameful coward, bullied by all the school loafers. To top off all the troubles, a curious granny gets in the way all the time, and the neighbor’s dog barks like crazy all day and night. The vicar's home and family are clearly far from the ideal of the magazine "Country Life". The arriving housekeeper, combining the functions of Mary Poppins and Mr. Wolf from Pulp Fiction, will improve the lives of her owners with the help of improvised means. Kitchen cleavers, hot irons and freshly washed pans are used. As a result of such extreme housekeeping, the barking outside the window stops, the bullies' bicycles break down at full speed, the libidinous daughter discovers erogenous zones in pie dough, the lover who bought tickets to Mexico to take the keeper of the home there finds peace in the cool water of the pond, and the boring husband suddenly begins to show miracles of dexterity both in the church pulpit and in bed, having read jokes about God on the Internet and refreshed his memory of the eroticism of King Solomon’s “Song of Songs.”

It's easy to see why this standard piece of British black humor is so refreshing. The Hollywood dream factory is full of maniacs who treat their role as Terminators with stupid and pretentious seriousness. The process of destroying characters that mean nothing to the audience, who have neither biography nor personalities (take, for example, films of recent and current release - “Lost”, “See No Evil”, “The Hills Have Eyes”, “2001 Maniac” "), put on stream and is the only driving force of the plot. Perhaps it's just the inertia of the huge and not very agile colossus of Hollywood, which is now throwing onto the market the remnants of the production boom that gave birth to the success of Wes Craven's Screams in the mid-90s. But, most likely, the overproduction of such products is also a response to the real demand of the grassroots teenage audience within America, which, in essence, dictates to the whole world what to watch in movies.

However, it is obvious that the rigid system of test screenings and subsequent adjustment of the film to very specific age groups of viewers destroys the already poor genre structure of cinema, reducing the genre to a scheme. It’s not for nothing that the script for the film “Be Quiet” circulated around Hollywood studios for a long time, but they didn’t take it on because it was “too complicated.” The problem, of course, is not the complexity, but the recipient. In an American film, it should be clear which generation of characters determines the film's audience. Moreover, persons over 50 are not considered role models at all. Relationships in the family can only be focused on the opposition between fathers and children, and no grandmothers, except caricatured fools, work here. Therefore, the script was eventually rewritten with a British accent, which connected the story about a maniacal grandmother with Peter Greenaway's Countdown, adding a little absurdity, a little suspense and a lot of fresh air. Even the conflict itself in the vicar's family has changed a lot. In the American version, his wife lacked sex, but here she misses his wit much more, because of which she once married a future priest. And the main mission that the visiting housekeeper performs is not to eliminate the annoying little dog and the annoying two-legged creatures filling the bottom of the pond, but to return a sense of humor to the father of the family and the preacher. Thus, the necessary ambiguity appeared in the film, which is designed to ensure that an adult cannot accept cheerful murders at face value as a way of bringing life to the ideal. Although, in the end, the ways of God are truly completely inscrutable.

Irina LYUBARSKAYA