A monument of British comedy cinema mainly known for his character Mr Bean, Rowan Atkinson drew his inspiration from several legends of the genre, including a famous French filmmaker.
From the early 90s, British viewers (and soon those around the world) began to cower at his misadventures, watching him jabber in incomprehensible language while always getting entangled in the most improbable situations.
After offering two feature films to his legendary Mr Bean, Rowan Atkinson was able to transfer the burlesque soul of his first character to other equally hilarious protagonists: the unforgettable Johnny English, of course, a delicious parody of the famous James Bond, and much more recently the unlucky housekeeper Trevor in Alone Face the Bee, an exciting Netflix series in which we found all the talent of the actor.
But where did Rowan Atkinson get his inspiration to compose his first sketches, his first gags, his first facial expressions? Interviewed in 2015 in the columns of Los Angeles Timesthe actor spoke about his influences in terms of comedy, citing in particular Monty Python, or legends of burlesque cinema such as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd, before discussing with particular interest a filmmaker French :
“I’m thinking particularly of a French actor called Jacques Tati. I loved his films, and I remember seeing Les Vacances de Mr Hulot at the age of 17, it was a major inspiration. He opened up a window onto a world that I had never observed before. I said to myself that it was really interesting to see how a comic situation could be developed in a purely visual way without being either under-speed or accelerated like Benny Hill . It was more weighed, it took its time. And I liked that.”
Universal Pictures
Mr. Hulot’s Vacation, which Rowan Atkinson also explains he showed on repeat at his school, is a film that the actor rewatched just before taking his own character on a little summer trip in Mr. Bean’s Vacation.
Even if Jacques Tati’s film necessarily inspired his own, Atkinson specifies that he nevertheless stood out from it, even going so far as to offer his feature film an inverse narrative structure:
“Our film is based on Bean’s desire to find himself on a beautiful beach”he declared in the press kit.
“In the French film, Hulot traveled for five minutes and stayed on the beach for an hour and a half, while in ours, Bean travels for an hour and a half and finally ends up on the beach for five minutes… Under this angle, Mr. Bean’s vacation is the opposite of Mr. Hulot’s…”
(Re)discover an extract from “Mr Bean’s Holiday”…