Francis Veber (1998)
I built up a strong resistance in the first fifteen minutes. The premise is that a group of affluent Parisian businessmen get together for dinner once a week, each of them inviting as his guest an ‘idiot’ whom the hosts can ridicule. (It should be said that ‘idiot’ isn’t an adequate translation of ‘con’, which is more strongly offensive.) I’d have thought once a week was pushing it for any kind of homo-social evening in this kind of world but let that pass. It seems you spot an idiot by virtue of his being less good-looking than you are. The odds are that he’s also likely to have an unusual and implicitly laughable interest. The invitees to the particular dinner with which the film is concerned include a boomerang fanatic and a man who builds matchstick models of the Eiffel Tower, the Golden Gate Bridge etc. Before he’s put in touch with the latter by a friend, publisher Pierre Brochant is briefly interested in the idiot potential of the friend’s father, who owns a collection of antique ladles. The matchstick man is François Pignon, a civil servant in the Ministry of Finance. Pierre arranges for François to go to his apartment before the dinner. Playing golf that afternoon (a different group of hosts might regard the golf course as a prime location for idiot-spotting), Pierre damages his back and is housebound for the evening, which he ends up spending with François. The latter seizes this opportunity to demonstrate his idiotic range – failing to carry out instructions or to understand irony or subterfuge, mistaking the caddish Pierre’s mistress for his wife and so on.
Pierre is, in other words and as you’d expect, hoist by his own petard. It’s an unpleasant idea that his punishment is, for the most part, being stuck with François all night although the writer-director Francis Veber eventually inserts some bits to show Pierre being forced to rue his philandering, self-serving behaviour and to realise that he’s the real ‘con’. In a phone call appeal to Pierre’s wife, who’s walked out on him, François confirms both his decency and his capacity to be hurt so that we, the audience, can feel ashamed of ourselves too. But only for a moment: the film ends on a freeze frame of Pierre about to react in another-fine-mess-you’ve-got-me-into style to François’s final cock-up. Most of the action takes place in the single location of Pierre’s apartment and it’s no surprise that Le dîner de cons is based on a stage play, also by Veber. (It seems unusual for the writer of a theatre piece to direct as well as adapt the screen version of his work.) Once we’re stuck in the apartment, I got to enjoy the film more: it’s a relief that we see next to nothing of the dinner happening elsewhere (just a snatch of idiot conversation there when Pierre calls with apologies for absence); and Jean Villeret (François) and Thierry Lhermitte (Pierre) play well together. The plot contains sufficient improbable twists, demanding urgent action, to give it a farcical liveliness and it’s neatly constructed enough to give it some of the formal elegance of farce too. The funny-and-sad-faced Villeret especially has the comedic zest and resource to keep up the film’s energy levels. The two leads are well supported by Daniel Prévost as a football fanatic auditor, Francis Huster as Brochart’s wronged but loyal friend (Huster has a fine laugh), and Catherine Frot as the hapless mistress. Alexandra Vandernoot is the elegant Mme Brochant and Christian Pereira particularly witty as the doctor who arrives to diagnose Pierre’s back injury.
Casting Steve Carell and Paul Rudd in the main roles for the 2010 American remake Dinner for Schmucks offered the possibility of a dynamic very different from (and less uncomfortable than) the sad clown/smooth egotist pairing of Villeret and Lhermitte: Carell and Rudd are both versatile enough to do either role. But the Schmucks poster is evidence enough that the opportunity to do something interesting was missed – Carell’s false teeth and glasses make him look an idiot in the most obvious way. (In plot terms, the US version, according to Wikipedia, uses only Veber’s basic premise.) Dinner for Schmucks runs nearly two hours but this precursor is remarkably short for a feature: Wikipedia shows it as eighty-seven minutes and IMDB as eighty but the BBC4 screening ran only seventy-five.
21 January 2011
