A Film Canon

Charmingly out of time, A Fish Called Wanda's comic style is nestled somewhere between the later Ealing comedies, when morbid elegance started to be offset by a more anarchic, action-driven edge, and the earlier Monty Python sketches, preoccupied with a kind of slapstick deconstruction of Oxbridge erudition, pretension and pomposity - or, as one of Wanda's characters reminds us during a comic torture scene, the fact that "all higher culture is based on cruelty." Insofar as the film reflects its generational distance from these earlier models, it's through the American anchors of Wanda (Jamie Lee Curtis) and Otto (Kevin Kline), a pair of jewel thieves who become embroiled with English zoophile Ken (Michael Palin) and barrister Archie (John Cleese) in their attempt to pull off the perfect London crime. Wanda and Otto don't just represent a culture shock, but a kind of temporal shock, to Ken and Archie, retrieving them from a staid, deadened existence that seems about thirty years in the past - and a great deal of the film's comedy comes from this sense of two different timeframes co-existing. Above all, it drives the contrast between Ken's ceaseless stuttering, which always places him about ten minutes behind the conversation at hand, and Otto's transformation of the 'American' into a kind of transnational vulgarian, a sustained expletive that colonises and cannibalises every culture in its way. Not only does this place him about ten minutes ahead of every conversation at hand, misunderstanding language as words for the sake of contemplating it as action, but it suggests that an Americanisation of English culture has already occurred. The result is a palpably false dichotomy between American and English conceptions of class that morphs comedy into wry, bittersweet irony, producing a surprisingly touching, tender romance between Archie and Wanda. Combined with Wanda's insatiable accent-fetish, it also creates enough of a continuity between language and action to ensure that physical comedy never takes on the self-referential incongruity that it does in the Monty Python films. The strongest set-pieces are little more than conversations distorted into action by a pair of English properties - one traditional, one contemporary, their unexpected connection creating one of the film's most memorable comic moments. It feels as if Crichton's aim is to create a transatlantic bestiary, a taxonomy of mild caricatures who might have lived in England or America their entire lives, but would leave both at a moment's notice, heading in the direction of an exotic, post-colonial Shangri-La, and John Prez's plaintive soundtrack.