Le Dîner de cons (1998) - film review

Every week, a group of successful Parisian businessmen attend a dinner party to which they each invite someone who appears to be an idiot.  The objective of the party is to see who can find the stupidest idiot.  Publisher Pierre Brochant is convinced that he has found the king of the idiots in François Pignon, a humdrum accountant whose sole topic of conservation is his passion for making scale models out of matchsticks.  Just when Pierre is confident of trumping his friends with his pedigree nutter, he has a severe back injury and so cannot attend the dinner party.  Instead, he invites Pignon to his apartment to see whether he lives up to his reputation.   Pignon does just that, and more.  By the end of the evening, Pierre’s life will be in tatters, but his guest will have taught him a valuable lesson...

Francis Veber’s adaptation of his hugely successful stage play Le Dîner de cons is his most popular film to date, attracting an audience of 9.2 million in France whilst also proving to be a massive hit abroad (notably in the United Kingdom).   With an impressive list of screenwriting and directing credits under his belt, Veber has garnered the reputation of one of France’s finest comedy scriptwriters.  Le Dîner de cons is just one in a long line of top notch Veber comedies that includes such tirelessly entertaining classics as Le Grand blond avec une chaussure noire (1972), L’Emmerdeur (1973), La Cage aux folles (1979) and La Chèvre (1981).

Not only is Le Dîner de cons one of Francis Veber’s funniest films, it is also his most minimalist, staged almost as a theatrical piece.  The cast is small (but beautifully formed, thanks to the presence of Catherine Frot and Francis Huster) and most of the action takes place almost entirely in one set, in the manner of an American sitcom.  This pared back approach allows Veber to get the most out of his witty dialogue, but at the risk of making the film feel uncomfortably static in places.  The situation is one that Veber has used before in many of his films: an everyman grouch is saddled with a likeable idiot who, in next to no time, completely upends his life, but in doing so makes him a better person.  The moral presumably is that a little chaos makes for a better world.

Just as Veber apparently has difficulty coming up with new storylines, he also tends to reuse the same character names, so the troublesome idiot/loser in his comedies is invariably named François/Francis Pignon/Perrin.  Among the many great actors to have played Veber’s comic gump in the past are: Pierre Richard, Jacques Brel, Patrick Bruel and Patrick Dewaere.  None of these can compare with Jacques Villeret who, in both the stage and screen versions of Le Dîner de cons, made the part his own and gave François Pignon a soul as well as a capacity for causing mayhem that makes Mr Bean and the entire St Trinian’s brood look like rank amateurs.

Going by his performance in Le Dîner de cons alone, Jacques Villeret definitely earns a place alongside the other great comic actors of French cinema.   Too often relegated to supporting roles for much of his career, Villeret became a major star through this role, although he sadly did not live long to appreciate his hard won acclaim as he died seven years after making this film.  Villeret was an exceptional actor who had a gift for playing tragicomic characters whose clownish exterior is belied by a humane and often tortured interior.  He won the Best Actor César in 1999 for his performance in Le Dîner de cons, and rightly so.  Villeret not only extracts all the laughs he can from Veber’s gag-laden script (his impersonation of a Belgian is so funny that it is almost infarctus inducing for French spectators), he also invests his character with depth and humanity, giving the film more punch than it might otherwise have had.  The film won two further Césars, one award for its screenplay, and another for Daniel Prévost in his admirable supporting role.

Le Dîner de cons is a cut above most mainstream French comedies, reminiscent of those old American screwball comedies with its quick-fire exchanges and wildly escalating comic situations.  However, whilst highly enjoyable, it does have one or two blemishes that are hard to overlook.  Thierry Lhermitte’s character is written as such a contemptuous rogue that, as hard as the actor may try (and to be honest he doesn’t try that hard), we just cannot empathise with him.  Instead, we find ourselves gloating at his burgeoning misery as the human bulldozer in the form of Jacques Villeret slowly but surely razes his complacent little life to the ground.  Veber’s attempts to get us to sympathise with Lhermitte at the end of the film are heavy-handed and painfully schmaltzy, and this robs the film of anything resembling an effective punch line.

Rather than building to a climax, the comedy just seems to fizzle out a few minutes before the ending and you can’t help feeling a little cheated.  This is one of those comedies that you enjoy intensely whilst it is running, but when the credits start rolling you are left feeling a little deflated.  It’s a bit like being deprived of your sweet after a sumptuous main course - you expect a mouth-watering tiramisu, and all you get is a fragment of a Jacob’s cream cracker.   Still, whilst it may not be perfect, Le Dîner de cons is far more satisfying than its bland American remake, Dinner for Schmucks (2010), which barely qualifies as an hors d’oeuvre for anorexic sparrows.  Francis Veber’s piquant sauce is better served in the French original every time, especially if there is a comic genius like Jacques Villeret on the menu.  Bon appétit, mes amis, and go easy on the vinegar.

© James Travers 2011

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This would go on my list of my favourite films. Maybe my favourite of all comedies. The acting is tremendous and the storyline really inventive yet not contrived.
Robert Scrivens (Swindon, England) 

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