Word: veber
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Writer-Director Francis Veber has repeatedly insisted that The Dinner Game is founded in reality: at some point in the fairly recent past, Parisian sophisticates took to hunting down idiots, issuing straight-faced dinner invitations to them and then awarding a prize to the swell who brought the most excruciating bore to the party...
...Veber imagined was a situation where one of the smart set is obliged to deal with one of his victims, one on one, man to man. That is simply arranged: Pierre (Thierry Lhermitte), a publisher, is suddenly immobilized by a backache on the very night he has asked Francois (Jacques Villeret), an accountant who makes matchstick models of things like the Eiffel Tower and the Concorde, over for a drink before the fools' parade. Francois is more than eager to divert Pierre from his pain...
...Veber, the author of the much adapted La Cage aux Folles as well as other farces, is a veteran of this sort of thing. His movies are slick, simple and irresistibly funny. Like all boulevard comedians, he understands that it is sex that drives everyone crazy. But of course not so much as a top button gets undone in The Dinner Game, despite the amount of libidinal energy running loose in Pierre's apartment and leaking down the telephone lines to a world just itching to compound the confusion...
...only is The Dinner Game not as funny as Veber's other films, it is confusingly serious, coating an un-funny plot with a problematic look at cruelty. The super-suave yuppie Bronchant (Thierry Lhermitte) regularly attends an "idiot's dinner," to which each member is challenged to invite the biggest fool he can find. The audience is caught between pitying Bronchant's "idiot," Pignon (Jacques Villeret, pictured) and laughing at his inability to comprehend even the simplest situations. To make matters worse, that laughter is rarely voluminous. When Pignon manages to confuse Bronchant's wife and mistress, leading...
...home with a Pignon who insists on "helping" him. Unwittingly, Pignon manages to unravel almost every part of Bronchant's chic life, from his wife and mistress to his furnishings and fine wine. Yet the farce never becomes a simple enactment of poetic justice; no matter how much Veber paints Pignon as a really likeable, sweet guy who makes matchstick models of famous monuments such as the Eiffel Tower to numb his broken heart, he remains the idiot. All the misadventures he causes stem from his kindness and gratitude toward Bronchant. This is the awkward basis of the farce...