| One of the many selections at this year’s Alliance Française French Film Festival, this comedy of errors sparkles with unpretentious charm and crisp humour. Laurent Bouhnik’s The Dinner Guest pairs a light-hearted look into a world of elitism, employment qualms and pretentiousness, with a finely tuned pace and subtle comedic farce.
After landing a job in Indonesia with a product packaging company, Gerard (Daniel Auteuil,) a previously unemployed and depressive fifty-year old, invites his new boss for dinner, hoping to make a good impression. With a leaky apartment roof, however, and his wife Colette’s (Valérie Lemercier) lack of culinary skills, the dinner invitation suddenly becomes an unexpected debacle.
Enter their next-door neighbour Alexandre (Thierry Lhermitte,) a PR and image consultant, who promises to transform the unfortunate couple into a model of well-groomed Parisian perfection. He assures them of success and of scrutinising every inch of their lives: apartment décor, style sense, culinary skills and general knowledge. The two need all the help they can get, especially as the dinner guest surprises them both with an early arrival.
The coupling of Auteuil and Lhermitte, two of France’s most respected comedy actors, is perhaps The Dinner Guest’s greatest asset. The counteraction of personalities (one simplistic and impetuous, the other suave and charismatic) drives the conflict of the story, while Lemercier exploits the film’s farcical aspect as the sincere, though naïve, Colette. The modesty of the couple’s existence is exquisitely detailed through their inexperience in worldly matters (Gerard believing the latest modern art can be bough from IKEA) and emotional fixations on trivialities like Gerard’s model trains and a helpless goldfish.
The dinner preparations, however, and the couple’s ‘education’ in style, are where the film truly shimmers with a delightful series of disasters and mishaps. With delectable morsels of dialogue to match, this is a dinner not to be missed.
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