guesthouse paradiso
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In the later episodes of the cult seventies
comedy series Fawlty Towers, someone took to
rearranging the letters on the hotel sign
behind the final credits. In the most outrageous version ‘Fawlty Towers’ became ‘Flowery Twats’. Twenty years later, welcome to a movie which makes even the dead-guest episode of Fawlty Towers seem tasteful. It’s called Guesthouse Paradiso and - probably a coincidence - one of the characters is called Richie Twat.
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Looking through the films in this issue of Preview, you could conclude that the film business was taking a turn for the better. Almost without exception, the characters, movies and directors in Preview 44 are driven by a noble purpose: to probe the burning issues of our time; to unearth the emotional truths in an unfeeling world; to explore the limits of human courage.
And now... Well, now you’ve got to page 48 and it’s time for something completely different. There is nothing noble about Guesthouse Paradiso. It is a film about rubber underwear and projectile vomiting, voyeurism and panty-pilfering, nipple rings and radioactive fish. It is also very funny, in the way that things that you ought not to laugh at but do are funny.
Guesthouse Paradiso is not exactly politically incorrect: even political incorrectness accepts some basic standards of human behaviour, and these standards are totally alien to Richie Twat and Eddie Elizabeth Ndingombaba, the joint owners of the world’s worst hotel. They are played by Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson, one of the most prolific pairings in British television, from The Young Ones - the series which launched most of the British comic talent of the eighties and nineties - via Filthy Rich and Catflap through to the bluntly (if appropriately) named Bottom.
“We like to set up our own kind of world,” says Mayall, of a partnership that began when he and Edmondson were students at Manchester University and is now nearly a quarter of a century old. “We have always made it clear on our television shows that we never go outside. In Bottom, for instance, whenever we seemed to, it was set up in a studio. We find it’s much better to build your own world, to make a fantasy and invite people into it.
“It’s a world where the level of fantasy is such that you can do the kind of things we do,” he continues, “such as be swung around with meathooks through your nose, without it seeming unreal. I mean, it is unreal, obviously, but you believe it for the moment.”
The movie - which the duo wrote together and which Edmondson directs - is more an accumulation of incidents than a story. The hotel that gives the film its title is on the verge of going out of business when it is rescued by the arrival of the Nice family. They are also a little naughty and, before long, Richie has unearthed some rubber underwear in their luggage, tried it on, got stuck, hidden from a new arrival in the oven, been cooked so that the rubber underwear fuses to his body, survived a rescue attempt by Eddie with compressed air and a skewer (as in: blow up the underwear and burst it), been blown out into the road and run over by a fish truck.
Everything else that happens pretty much stems from that. The new arrival is beautiful Gina Carbonara (Hélène Mahieu), fleeing from her violently macho boyfriend, Gino Bolognese (Vincent Cassel). Naturally, Richie and Eddie get involved. And the fish turns out to have been caught in a leak from the nearby nuclear plant: the truck that ran over Richie was taking it away for disposal. Eddie serves it up for dinner, however, and it causes projectile vomiting on a scale which... well, we won’t go into that (although the film does, in the most graphic of detail). But the nuclear fish also turns out to be their salvation: the government cover-up which follows results in Richie and Eddie being given £10 million, new identities and first-class air tickets to the Caribbean, which is where they head off to - with Gina, naturally. We’re not talking realism here. But, as Mayall says, you believe it while you’re watching it.
“It’s about Richie and Eddie,” explains Mayall who, off screen, is charming, handsome and well-educated. On screen, however, he and Edmondson seem to have got stuck in a particularly unfortunate period of childhood. “We only have two characters we can play and have been playing since the seventies. Our working characters are nearly always called Richie and Eddie. We were Rick and Vyvyan in The Young Ones, but Richie and Eddie in Mr Jolly Lives Next Door and Bottom. But this is not a Bottom movie. I’m Richie Twat in this, whereas I was Richie Richard in that and Eddie - who is Eddie Elizabeth Ndingombaba here - was Eddie Hitler in Bottom.” It all, as you can see, makes perfect sense.
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