I remember the old semi-legendary story, when foreign viewers were delighted by a very serious scene in a Soviet film. In it, the actor opens the tap, and the water does not flow. It was rated as a masterpiece gag: imagine, you open the water and it is not!
In fact, any culture consists of a completely universal symbolic set, whose semiosis is difficult due to local specifics. The fact that for a European - to enter the room without taking off his shoes - is perceived as quite normal, for a Japanese, a terrible scandal and a true riot.
Looking at "Private Celebration", you realize that the Russian eye to watch this film is a little difficult. What about the fact that in the postwar years there was a natural shortage of everything and everything, and you have to tighten your belts, get food and things on cards, and about the usual way of life only dream. In our country and in a time of peace, deficits are a norm from which we have begun to depart psychologically only in the last two decades. But the British built a whole plot on this. Here, of course, do not forget about the notorious “privacy”, the unconditional “my home is my fortress”, but this principle can be neglected when everyone wants to eat, but not everyone succeeds. Thus, the piglet, maliciously appropriated by one English family, generates a chain of comic inconsistencies, the main of which is the permeability of the philistine fortress itself, into which various executors of laws invade, compared as much as with the fascist occupiers, so to England and did not reach.
The ensemble plays out a very funny story, slightly reminiscent of the absurdist atmosphere and Monty Python (the performer of one of the main roles just from this troupe), and any of the frivolous situational comedies that, it seems, in Britain can be put on any, even the most serious topic. So in this film, there is no talk about the trauma of war, moral duty to the fallen, etc. On the contrary, the post-war deficit appears as a funny episode that cannot last long and is interesting as a short-term incident.
In fact, can't water flow from the tap if we open it?