Race to the bottom: Just when you thought film humour couldn't get any more lavatorial, the Inbetweeners take it way Down Under

By Brian Viner

Published: 19:39 EST, 7 August 2014 | Updated: 06:25 EST, 8 August 2014

The Inbetweeners 2 (15)

Verdict: Relentlessly vulgar

Rating:

Verdict: Repellent but compelling

Rating:

As my wife was booking tickets for my 15-year-old son Jacob, his friend Jake and me to see The Inbetweeners 2 at our nearest multiplex on Wednesday evening, Jake’s fervent request was for them to be seated several rows apart from me. The thought of any schoolmates spotting him with his old dad was too much to bear.

So I sat on my own, in an auditorium packed entirely with people young enough to be my children and their friends, which two of them were. Not that I saw them. Jacob’s paranoia extended to us parting company in the car-park beforehand, and if he’d thought there was any chance of me agreeing, he’d have asked me to wear a false beard.

Like the first big-screen version of the TV sitcom, which took more than £45 million at the box office, The Inbetweeners 2 is not meant for the likes of me. And it won’t be the likes of me who propel it to near- certain commercial success. It took £2.75 million on Wednesday, the opening day, which is more than any live-action comedy in British cinema history.

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Crude: The Inbetweeners quartet Jay, Will, Simon and Neil in their new movie, which is set in Australia

Also in common with the first film, it is set abroad — this time, Australia — where our hapless, libidinous quartet of Will, Jay, Neil and Simon (played respectively by Simon Bird, James Buckley, Blake Harrison and Joe Thomas) get into improbable scrapes in which koalas and dolphins are demeaned almost as much as the  human participants.

Many of these scrapes involve untimely bowel movements, and excretions of almost every other kind. It is all done with carefully deliberate vulgarity, as unspeakably gross as it could possibly be.

The plot, such as it is, has Jay contacting his three mates to say how much fun  he’s having in Sydney, where he runs a nightclub and has bedded every  single famous Australian woman, from Elle Macpherson to . . . Dame Edna Everage.

So THE other three head Down Under only to find, naturally, that Jay has rather bigged up his circumstances. He does work at a nightclub, but he’s the lavatory attendant. It is the first lavatorial joke, but assuredly not the last.

There are also jokes about sex that  parents really shouldn’t want their teenage children to hear, and frankly, vice-versa. But is it funny? Well, that is entirely subjective, of course.

Writer-directors Damon Beesley and Iain Morris are talented chaps, undoubtedly, and I greatly enjoyed the mickey-taking of gap-year clichés. In fact, I laughed out loud, twice. But when I laughed, nobody else did, and when everyone else laughed, I didn’t. That’s the lot of a proper grown-up at an Inbetweeners movie.

In some ways there’s no point in assuming the moral high ground and lambasting the film’s relentless crudity. It is what it is, and it is carried off by an energetic, engaging cast, even if they are getting a little old to pass themselves off as gauche young men barely out of their teens (Bird, as the nerdy Will, turns 30 this month).

But here’s the worrying thing. When the lights went up, I saw at least a dozen children who were much closer to ten than 15. If certificates are to have any meaning, then they must be properly asserted and cinemas that fail to do so should face serious consequences.

When I was 11 or 12, I was exposed to no greater vulgarity than Benny Hill. This is infinitely lewder, cruder, and, especially in the way it objectifies young women, more harmful.

In Welcome To New York is also intentionally revolting, and also about a libido: that of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the French financier who owed his glittering career to his wisdom from the neck up, and its destruction to his wantonness from the waist down.

Here, the man widely known as DSK is thinly disguised as one George Devereaux. He is played by Gerard Depardieu, in a remarkable, bravura performance: repellently yet compellingly monstrous.

Official Trailer: Welcome to New York, Gerard Depardieu

Gerard Depardieu plays the man widely known as DSK is thinly disguised as one George Devereaux

'Welcome To New York is also intentionally revolting, and also about a libido: that of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the French financier' writes Brian Viner

The film tells the story of events leading up to and following a trial for serious sexual assault, following accusations levelled by a Manhattan hotel maid. While it purports  to be fiction, these events bear a notable similarity to those which, in 2011, forced DSK to resign as head of the International Monetary Fund. As I say, it is a thin disguise.

Nothing else about Devereaux is thin. It has been reported that Strauss-Kahn, ‘frightened and sickened’ by this film, is suing its producers for defamation. I wonder whether he has also complained about being portrayed as quite so fat? Depardieu is huge these days.

His enormity is relevant, however, because it helps to show his character as a man of such gargantuan appetites, for food and drink but mainly for sex, that they can hardly be satisfied.

The casting is relevant, too. Depardieu is one of the few Frenchmen whose notoriety could be said to exceed that of DSK. Indeed, in the year of the DSK ‘scandale’, he was escorted from a plane after urinating in the aisle.

So it is no coincidence that he and George Devereaux have the same initials, for director Abel Ferrara deliberately blurs the distinction between the star and his character.

The film actually begins with a mock-up press conference in which Depardieu, as himself, speaks of his disdain for politicians. As Devereaux, he is so irredeemably depraved that a Frenchman of a previous century, Rabelais, would recognise him at once.

The first 20 minutes or so offer  a shockingly graphic portrayal of  Bacchanalian excess, with Devereaux arriving at a swanky hotel and rutting like a pig with prostitutes even before he has got round to removing his coat.

This film is not for the easily offended. It might not even be for the not-so-easily offended.

In the most harrowing of numerous startlingly unpleasant scenes, Devereaux attempts to rape the journalist daughter of an old friend, who has come to interview him. And after she has escaped his revolting clutches, he reflects on the encounter with a half-smile on his face.

Here is a man who doesn’t care whether his urges are fed by consensual sex or assault. In fact, he barely understands the difference, and  certainly feels no remorse.

‘It’s a crime, that I want to feel young?’ he asks his ambitious and independently rich wife, Simone, brilliantly played, in a rare but  welcome return to the big screen, by Jacqueline Bisset.

Simone, though more sinned against than sinning, is not sympathetically drawn. The implication is that she turned a blind eye to her husband’s sexual incontinence, as long as he kept it discreet. But the trial blows that discretion apart. There are some powerful, semi-improvised scenes as the couple swap recriminations.

If there is a structural fault to the film, it is that Ferrara rather overlooks Devereaux’s global influence. That he is a hugely important man is really evident only from the phalanx of photographers following him.

Still, the crux of this seedy tale is human frailty, not human achievement. And from Devereaux’s weaknesses we can learn plenty about other powerful but destructively  priapic men, not least Presidents Kennedy and Clinton.

Ultimately, though, it is Depardieu’s electric performance that  lingers in the mind. And while you might want to watch through your fingers a scene in which his character is strip-searched, don’t close your eyes altogether.

This is acting at its bravest and,  in more ways than one, most  nakedly raw.

The Inbetweeners 2 official trailer

 Video Source YouTube

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