Le Dîner de Cons

Francis Veber spent the 1970s and 1980s as one of the most reliable comic engineers in French cinema, writing La Cage aux Folles, Les Compères and Les Fugitifs before stepping behind the camera himself. Le Dîner de Cons, released in 1998, is the cleanest distillation of his method: a stage play he had run with great success at the Théâtre des Variétés, adapted by the playwright into his own film, the chamber comedy stripped to two men, one apartment and an evening that refuses to end. It became one of the highest-grossing French films of its year and the work that fixed Veber's reputation as the country's pre-eminent farceur.

The premise belongs to a Parisian publishing crowd who host a weekly “dîner de cons”: each guest brings along an idiot, and the cruellest specimen wins. Pierre Brochant (Thierry Lhermitte, all sleek hauteur) believes he has the champion in François Pignon (Jacques Villeret), a tax-office clerk who builds the Eiffel Tower out of matchsticks. A thrown back forces Brochant to receive Pignon at home, and the film settles into a single set with a telephone, a pulled muscle, and a chasm of misunderstandings between them. Villeret's performance — open-faced, exquisitely calibrated — won the César for Best Actor; Daniel Prévost, as a zealous fiscal inspector, took Supporting; Veber the screenwriting prize.

French critics greeted it as a small classic the day it opened, and audiences answered with nine million admissions. Its lines passed into common usage; its title became shorthand for a particular kind of bourgeois cruelty. Hollywood remade it as Dinner for Schmucks in 2010, to almost universal agreement that the original's verbal precision did not survive the crossing. The film endures in France as a benchmark of the form: a comedy where the laughter is bound to a real and uncomfortable idea about who, in any given room, the fool actually is.