French Farce Has Cruel Pretensions

Francis Veber, the man behind the extraordinary comic feats La Cage Aux Folles and Les Comperes, (both eventually remade in Hollywood as The Birdcage and Father's Day) has crafted another farce: The Dinner Game. But it falls short of Veber's usual promise. Given the unsurpassable hilarity of Les Comperes--a film that amuses even after repeated viewings--The Dinner Game pales in comparison.

Not 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 to a calamity, the guilty pleasure of dark humor is unavoidable. But that scene, along with a few clever word plays that only the French seem to be able to pull off, is as funny as the movie gets. For the most part, The Dinner Game represents a failure, morally and comedically.

Crippled by a golf injury so painful that he is unable to attend his-infamous dinner, Bronchant is stuck at 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.

As the movie progresses, Bronchant's true nature is revealed as well. Despite his snide comments and apparent dislike of Pignon, Bronchant still needs his "idiot" to help him out, whether by physically carrying him up the stairs or making phone calls. At one point, Bronchant reveals that the reason he only has expensive wines in his home is because he worked very hard his whole life so that he doesn't have to drink cheap wine. Therefore the audience sees through the upper-bourgeois crust that hides Bronchant's low upbringing just as Pignon's idiocy never obscures his human qualities.

This is where the flaw of The Dinner Game lies: Its statement about humanity is much too ambivalent to be truly farcical. One leaves the theater unsure if it is trying to appeal to the audience's sense of justice or be a lightheaded comedy. By the end of the movie, no one has won--not the docile Pignon, not the nouveau riche Bronchant, not the show-stealing Daniel Prevost in the role of tax inspector Cheval. What starts off as a simple reversal of roles, with the idiot turning the tables on the yuppies, ends up not being a reversal at all; if anything, these characters seem more locked than ever into their stiff socio-economic roles, returning to their unhappy lives by the end of the film.

Surely, one will get a few laughs out of The Dinner Game, particularly at the fast-paced onset of the film, but all too soon the true tragedy of the movie sets in. Pignon is a nice person, it feels bad to laugh at him, and in the end he doesn't disprove the fact that he's an idiot at all, but rather has perhaps pointed out the audience's idiocy: laughing during a movie that is more tragic than it is comic.