The Dinner Game


The Dinner Game is a 1998 French comedy film written and directed by Francis Veber, adapted from his play Le Dîner de Cons. It became that year's top-grossing French film at the French box office.

Plot

Pierre Brochant, a Parisian publisher, attends a weekly "idiots' dinner", where guests, who are modish, prominent Parisian businessmen, must bring along an oblivious "idiot." The ideal "idiot" is usually one who is obsessed by a ridiculous hobby or theme, whom the other guests can ridicule subtly all evening without the idiot catching on. At the end of the dinner, the evening's "champion idiot" is selected among the businessmen.
With the help of an "idiot scout", Brochant manages to find a "gem", François Pignon, a sprightly employee of the Finance Ministry. Pignon has a passion for building matchstick replicas of famous landmarks. Shortly after inviting Pignon to his home, Brochant is suddenly stricken with debilitating back pain while playing golf at his exclusive country club. His wife, Christine, leaves him shortly before Pignon arrives at his apartment, considering his still wanting to go to the "idiots' dinner," an unabashedly cruel aspect of his personality. After Pignon arrives, Brochant initially wants him to leave, but instead becomes reliant on him, because of his immobilizing back injury and his need to resolve his relationship issues.
File: Daniel Prévost Jacques Villeret Césars.jpg |thumb|upright=0.9| Jacques Villeret plays François Pignon, the “idiot” invited to discuss his matchstick replicas of famous landmarks, who unintentionally wrecks Brochant’s life.


Daniel Prévost plays Lucien Cheval, a tax inspector who provides the address of Christine’s suspected lover. Cheval detects expensive objets d’art on which Brochant has not paid taxes.
Brochant solicits Pignon's assistance in making a series of telephone calls to locate his wife, but Pignon blunders each time, including revealing to Christine the existence of Brochant's former mistress, Marlene Sasseur. Thinking Marlene is Brochant's sister, since her name sounds like "sa sœur", Pignon mistakenly calls her and reveals Brochant's condition. Marlene announces that she is coming to help care for Brochant. When Brochant learns of Pignon's blunder, he asks Pignon to chase Marlene away, not wanting to complicate matters with "a nymphomanic". Before Marlene's arrival, Christine briefly returns home; mistaking Christine for Marlene, Pignon gives "Marlene" advice on how to be less demanding to win back Brochant. Now informed of her husband's infidelity, Christine leaves. When the real Marlene arrives, an exasperated Brochant realizes what happened and asks Marlene to leave.
In the meantime, fearing Christine might have gone back to her previous lover, Brochant coaches Pignon in a ruse to call his former best friend, Juste Leblanc, from whom he stole Christine, to determine whether Christine is with him. Phoning to impersonate a film producer who wants to buy the rights to a book Christine co-wrote with Leblanc, Pignon blunders by giving Brochant's phone number to Leblanc. Recognizing the number, Leblanc calls Brochant to say that it hurt when Christine left him too. Unexpectedly sympathetic, Leblanc arrives to try to help Brochant locate Christine.
Making matters even worse, to get the address of a Lothario with whom Christine might have taken refuge, Pignon invites tax inspector Lucien Cheval to Brochant's house, compelling Brochant to quickly to hide most of his valuables in an attempt to disguise his tax evasion. Through an ironic coincidence, Cheval's own wife is with the Lotario, upsetting Cheval and increasing the likelihood of a tax audit for Brochant.
Through the evening's events, Brochant is forced to reassess his mistakes. Brochant almost succeeds in reconciling with Christine when Pignon calls her to describe all the efforts Brochant has made that day to straighten out his life, including breaking up with his mistress, reconciling with his best friend, and wanting to make amends to her. A skeptical Christine asks Pignon whether Brochant is by his side, coaching him. Though Brochant is next to him―amazed at how gracefully Pignon has managed to describe his repentance to Christine―Pignon lies and says that he left Brochant and is calling from a phone booth. Christine hangs up in a pensive mood. Chastened, Brochant apologizes to Pignon for his arrogance and says that they will attend the next idiots' dinner together with him as Pignon's idiot.
When a softened-up Christine calls Brochant at home to discuss reconciliation―true to form―Pignon absent-mindedly picks up the phone that is next to him. Christine immediately hangs up, wrongly convinced that Brochant has manipulated Pignon's eloquent account of Brochant's reformation. The film ends with Brochant again calling Pignon an idiot and blaming Pignon for ruining his life.

Cast

The play on which the film is based premiered on 18 September 1993 at the Théâtre des Variétés, Paris, with a cast including Jacques Villeret as François Pignon, Claude Brasseur as Pierre Brochant, Michel Robbe as Juste Leblanc and Gérard Hernandez as Lucien Cheval, and directed by Pierre Mondy; it was revived the following season before touring to Bayonne, Liege and Marseille. The play continues to be revived.
As the plans of the hitman in Veber's earlier L'Emmerdeur were continually thrown off course by a well-meaning idiot, in Le Dîner de cons, the same relationship occurs, with "Thierry Lhermitte's supercilious publisher having his well-ordered life dismantled by the disastrously eager-to-please Jacques Villeret". Le Dîner de cons ran for over 900 performances on the Parisian stage before being made into a film, so "not surprisingly the pacing and mechanics of the comedy run with dovetailed precision".
With over 9 million tickets sold at the box office, Le Dîner de cons was the second most popular film in France in 1998, after Titanic.
The character name "François Pignon" occurs in several films of Francis Veber. Previously in L'Emmerdeur of 1973 Jacques Brel's character has the same name, as does Pierre Richard's role in Les Compères and Les Fugitifs; later Daniel Auteuil in Le Placard, Gad Elmaleh in La Doublure and Patrick Timsit in the 2008 re-make of L'Emmerdeur are François Pignon.
Besides Cosma's score the film uses the 1961 song "Le temps ne fait rien à l'affaire" by Georges Brassens.

Critical response

The film was positively received by critics. On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 74% based on 46 reviews, with an average score of 6.8/10. On Metacritic, the film received a score of 73 based on 19 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
Kemp noted that "in this kind of comic pairing isn't the gravitation of the idiot to the straight guy, which is understandable enough, but the reverse: the fatal delusion on the part of a logical individual, operating on cool self-interest, that even the most unpromising human material can, with a little coaching, be co-opted into the same well-ordered system". For Kemp the film was stolen by Villeret as Pignon "his balding, spherical head, bug eyes and pudgy little mouth" appearing as "a cross between a giant baby and a less aggressive Zero Mostel. His comic persona also shares something of a baby's abrupt, discontinuous mood swings, and in the film's funniest moments the camera focuses delightedly on his mobile moon-face as it slumps from inane self-satisfaction to lip-quivering dismay".

Accolades

At the 1999 César Awards, the film was honored with six nominations, of which it won three. The categories it won were Best Actor for Jacques Villeret, Best Supporting Actor for Daniel Prévost, and Best Original Screenplay or Adaptation for Francis Veber. It was nominated but did not win for Best Film, Veber as Best Director, and Catherine Frot as Best Supporting Actress.
Award / Film FestivalCategoryRecipients and nomineesResult
César AwardsBest FilmNomitated
César AwardsBest DirectorFrancis VeberNomitated
César AwardsBest ActorJacques VilleretWon
César AwardsBest Supporting ActorDaniel PrévostWon
César AwardsBest Supporting ActressCatherine FrotNomitated
César AwardsBest Original Screenplay or AdaptationFrancis VeberWon
Goya AwardsBest European FilmNomitated
Lumière AwardsBest ActorJacques VilleretWon
Lumière AwardsBest ScreenplayFrancis VeberWon

Soundtrack

Adaptations