booby-trapped (Le Dîner de cons [The Dinner Game] (DVD))

Member Name: pontecaille

Product:	Le Dîner de cons [The Dinner Game] (DVD)
Date:	12/04/02 (135 review reads)
Rating:

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Altogether, the story is rather simple. Pierre Brochant, a book publisher takes part every Wednesday evenings in " a dinner of idiots ", rather immoral “game " which he invented with his friends.

The principle is to come to the dinner accompanied by an idiot!
However, this Wednesday, Brochant hasn’t found yet anyone. But when he meets François Pignon, accountant within the Finances department and fond of miniature replications of monuments made out with matchsticks, Pierre is subjugated by the character and truly believes he found the “Father of all idiots”.
He quickly gets excited and hopes well to win the contest using this world-class idiot.

But Pignon is not an ordinary idiot, he is also a Mister catastrophe... he is a bit like the characters in the “Mr and Miss…books” for kids.
But his clumsiness acts more as tragic in his life rather than funny and it always participates to his solitude and pushes him away from socializing. When Brochant offered him that hint of friendship he only could genuinely accept it without having any doubt of what he was going ahead for.

If you want to relax, to burst laughing, to spend a very good moment of honest fun, I can only advise you " the dinner of idiots ".
Adapted play of Francis Veber, famous French writer, the film has during more than one hour a theatrical structure, not that I know anything about theatre but it is obvious there is a unit of place, unit of time and unit of action.

The protagonist are Jacques Villeret, always present in comic but smart films who exults in this role, Thierry Lhermitte, odious at first you will say and then pathetic in his behaviour, Francis Huster, unusual in this role and Daniel Prevost, machiavellian in his character of tax inspector, that definitely suits him.

That bunch of French actors is well known in France and has been celebrated for years now. Yo
u clearly see the pleasure they take in acting and they have enormous talents. They all have a very distinct gift (and have done several theatre appearances) and when put together it is a real tycoon, a delirious but very well adapted film.
The very unique diversity of the characters, the situations and the motives bring the actors together and only laughter merges form this fusion. The dialogues are hilarious and very easy to understand too for foreigners.
This movie is part of the beautiful palmares of French films I would like to see more often on big screens.

Off the records, I attended a dinner like that. Maybe in a different way: I knew the so-called friends who invited us over for a raclette party and that I haven’t spoken to for months had very precise and naughty thoughts by doing so. We used to be very close but time flies by and people take different paths in life. Questions were arisen on our private life and the way we have been handling it and on many other grounds but somehow it turned out they found them trapped in their own game and felt rather ashamed of not being in control of the situation anymore.
What a satisfaction at the end. I don’t think they swallowed the pill smoothly but I certainly did.

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