A Fool Turns the Tables

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Writer-Director Francis Veber has repeatedly insisted that The Dinner Game is founded in reality: at some point in the fairly recent past, Parisian sophisticates took to hunting down idiots, issuing straight-faced dinner invitations to them and then awarding a prize to the swell who brought the most excruciating bore to the party.

All Veber imagined was a situation where one of the smart set is obliged to deal with one of his victims, one on one, man to man. That is simply arranged: Pierre (Thierry Lhermitte), a publisher, is suddenly immobilized by a backache on the very night he has asked Francois (Jacques Villeret), an accountant who makes matchstick models of things like the Eiffel Tower and the Concorde, over for a drink before the fools' parade. Francois is more than eager to divert Pierre from his pain.

Before the night is out, he has managed to estrange Pierre from both his wife and his mistress and to bring the tax collector (played with wonderful avidity by Daniel Prevost) down on him. But in the end, for all his clumsiness, Francois proves himself the better man--warmhearted and unworthy of the contempt that has been so richly visited upon him.

Veber, the author of the much adapted La Cage aux Folles as well as other farces, is a veteran of this sort of thing. His movies are slick, simple and irresistibly funny. Like all boulevard comedians, he understands that it is sex that drives everyone crazy. But of course not so much as a top button gets undone in The Dinner Game, despite the amount of libidinal energy running loose in Pierre's apartment and leaking down the telephone lines to a world just itching to compound the confusion.

What's good about the movie--and what sets it apart from American comedy at the moment--is the way it refuses to fall across the line into vulgarity, let alone grossness. One's enjoyment of it may very well derive from the way it contrasts with the climate in which it is released. There's something delightfully old-fashioned about its archness and its solid architecture.

--By Richard Schickel