The series A posteriori le cinema is an occasion to celebrate the 7the art by revisiting key titles that celebrate important anniversaries.
Every Wednesday, Pierre Brochant, a prosperous Parisian publisher, organizes a “cons’ dinner” with friends. From one week to another, everyone tries to find a good specimen. During the evening, Pierre and his gang make fun of the “idiots” without their knowledge, then decide on a winner. Uplifting. However, when Pierre comes across François Pignon, he does not know that he is about to discover how much karma does not forgive. Released in France 25 years ago, in April 1998, The stupid dinner earned the filmmaker Francis Veber one of his most important triumphs, in addition to resurrecting the film career of Jacques Villeret, indescribable as a “champion”.
The film is based on a play by Francis Veber created in 1993. Despite its popularity, Veber did not believe in the potential for an adaptation.
“The story of a guy blocked by a turn of the kidneys and stuck on a sofa in front of an idiot will not make an entrance”, then estimates the main interested party, comments reported by Jean-Luc Wachthausen in Pointin 2020.
The Gaumont company was able to convince Veber. When distributing the roles, however, there was hesitation: Jacques Villeret was brilliant on stage as François Pignon, this naive and blundering guy, but in the cinema, the actor remained mainly associated with the comedy of 1981 Cabbage soup. To continue Wachthausen:
“Originally, Francis Veber thought of Gérard Depardieu for the role, judging Jacques Villeret not well enough known to the general public. The tall blond, PierreRichard, a handsome specimen of a happy imbecile in The goat of the same Veber, saw himself there too. Finally, Jacques Villeret, in the midst of depression at the time, won the bet at the end of the tests, making Veber say that he had “the temper of a Raimu”. »
Francis Veber conceiving his comedies as precision mechanics, he did not hesitate to have Villeret and Thierry Lhermitte (Brochant) take over until he judged the desired effect achieved.
“It was 98% work and 2% fun”, declared Jacques Villeret during the outing, still according to Point.
To host Thierry Ardisson, who asks him to Everybody talks about it what the copious budget of the film was used for, the action taking place essentially in Brochant’s apartment, Veber answers, in the same order of ideas:
” The weather. Time is very expensive in the cinema. And since I wanted to give the film a rhythm, to de-theatricalize it, we worked a lot, a lot on the takes. »
The game was worth the candle: The stupid dinner was a hit with more than nine million admissions in France. Immediately, many replicas became cult (“Just Leblanc!”). A remake Hollywood was produced: Dinner for Schmucks (The stupid dinner), starring Steve Carrell.
Moreover, Francis Veber is the French filmmaker whose films — or screenplays, or plays — have been taken up the most in Hollywood: the pain in the ass, The tall blond with a black shoe, The toy, Freinds, The fugitives, Lining…
funny drama
Despite this extraordinary success, Veber admits to having often felt despised by “the intelligentsia”, as he confides to the Figaro in 2013 :
“There are always two audiences: the one who likes to laugh and the one who likes to think that he likes to think. In festivals, there are more “meaningful” films than entertaining. There are also fabulous comedies and — crummy comedies. »
Veber is not entirely wrong. At the exit of Dinner of idiotsone can read in Releasewritten by Didier Péron:
“No surprise comes to spice The stupid dinner by Francis Veber, who perfectly satisfies the rules of vaudeville: this efficiency ends up creating monotony. This “Dinner” smells a bit warm. »
Paradoxically, there is a serious background in the comedies imagined by Veber who, like his idol Billy Wilder, willingly erects his comedies on dramatic bases. In the pain in the assthe title character is suicidal, in The fugitiveswe have this desperate widowed father who robs a bank to pay for treatment for his daughter, in The toythe child-king mourns his dead mother and his absent father, etc.
Where does this propensity to create the hilarity of gravity come from? Perhaps from childhood, judging by the first sentences of Veber’s autobiography, Let it stay between us :
“I was born in Neuilly to a Jewish father and an Armenian mother. Two genocides, two bloody Wailing Walls, everything to make a comedy. »
Anyway, in The stupid dinner, Pignon lived in great loneliness, hence his catastrophic attempts to become indispensable in the eyes of Brochant. This loneliness, Brochant is finally condemned to it when his wife dumps him with an involuntary boost from Pignon. Pignon who, under his harmless exterior, could almost be the little brother of Nemesis, the goddess of divine vengeance…
A recurring character in the work of Francis Veber, François Pignon (or sometimes his variation François Perrin) is now part of French folklore. As proof, this article from Figaro of 2013 titled: “François Pignon: the favorite idiot of the French”.
“He doesn’t understand anything. And no doubt this is the main quality of the idiot who, casually, understands everything but with a delay. He’s brain-slow but not as dumb as you’d like to think. […] The sublime idiot who deceives, in spite of himself, all his people, there is undoubtedly his unconscious genius. The perfect idiot gets it all when the others, clever, unfortunately think they are superior, when they will be the turkeys of the farce. »
A description that fits like a glove to the protagonist of the Dinner of idiots.
Better be a dick
On the matter, however, the philosopher, writer and activist for the dignity of autistic people Josef Schovanec offers a different reading:
“The entire screenplay of the film is built on autism, or rather on the confrontation between two worlds that operate in diametrically opposed ways. There is even an allusion to the history of psychoanalysis: we may have forgotten it, but European psychiatry or psychoanalysis was built by the periodic holding of public seminars where the practitioner brought in a “madman” or a “hysteric”, often with considerable success with the general public”, he wrote in 2017 in an essay published by RTBF (Belgian Radio-Television of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation).
Further on, Schovanec explains how the film made collateral victims among members of the autistic community, who became, with the popularity of the film, popular guests for these cruel “dinners”. After wondering whether or not to condemn the film, the author responds with nuance:
“Our society is not that far removed from the days when people with disabilities begged for food in human zoos or went from fair to fair. It is up to us to reverse the paradigm and transmute this into real encounters. »
While waiting to get there, we can always fall back on these words of Didier Péron in Release “Better to be a jerk than a bastard.” »