The A posteriori le Cinema series is an opportunity to celebrate the 7th art by revisiting important titles that celebrate important anniversaries.
Every Wednesday, Pierre Brochant, a wealthy Parisian publisher, organizes a “Cons’ Dinner” with friends. From week to week everyone is trying to find a good copy. During the evening, Pierre and his gang make fun of the “idiots” unbeknownst to them and then decide a winner. Uplifting. However, when Pierre meets François Pignon, little does he know that he will soon discover just how unforgiving karma is. Released 25 years ago, in April 1998, in France, Le Diner de Cons gave filmmaker Francis Veber one of his most important triumphs, in addition to reviving the film career of Jacques Villeret, indescribably “champion”.
The film is based on a 1993 play by Francis Veber. Despite its popularity, Veber did not believe in the potential for an adaptation.
“The story of a guy blocked by a twisted kidney and stuck on a sofa in front of an idiot will not make an appearance,” estimates the main interest, comments reported by Jean-Luc Wachthausen in Le Point in 2020.
The Gaumont company was able to convince Veber. However, there were concerns when casting the roles: Jacques Villeret excelled on stage as François Pignon, that naïve and clumsy guy, but in the cinema the actor was mainly associated with the 1981 comedy Cabbage Soup. Continue to Wachthausen:
“Francis Veber originally thought of Gérard Depardieu for the role because he felt Jacques Villeret was not well known to the general public. Tall blonde PierreRichard, a fine example of a happy git in The Goat by the same Veber, saw himself there too. Eventually Jacques Villeret, then in the midst of a depression, won the bet at the end of the tests, making Veber say he had “the temperament of a Raimu”. »
Francis Veber, who conceived his comedies as precision mechanics, did not hesitate to take on Villeret and Thierry Lhermitte (Brochant) until he had assessed the desired effect.
“It was 98% work and 2% fun,” explained Jacques Villeret during the outing, still according to Le Point.
To the animator Thierry Ardisson, who asks him in Tout le monde en parle what the lavish budget of the film was used for, the action essentially takes place in Brochant’s apartment, Veber replies with the same train of thought:
” 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 Idiots’ Dinner was a hit with more than nine million entries in France. Many replicas immediately became cult (“Just Leblanc!”). A Hollywood remake was produced: Dinner for Schmucks starring Steve Carrell.
In addition, Francis Veber is the French filmmaker whose films – or scripts or plays – have received the most attention in Hollywood: The Troublemaker, The Long Blonde with a Black Shoe, The Toy, The Friends, The Fugitives, The Lining…
funny spectacle
Despite this extraordinary success, Veber admits that he often felt despised by “the intelligentsia”, as he confided to Le Figaro in 2013:
“There are always two target groups: the one who likes to laugh and the one who likes to think he likes to think. There are more “sensible” films at festivals than entertaining ones. There’s also great comedy and lousy comedy. »
Veber is not entirely wrong. At the end of the dîner de cons we can read in Liberation penned by Didier Péron:
“There are no surprises to spice up Francis Veber’s Dinner for Cons, which fits the rules of vaudeville perfectly: this efficiency creates monotony in the end. This “dinner” smells a bit warm. »
Paradoxically, the comedies conceived by Veber have a serious background which, like his idol Billy Wilder, readily builds his comedies on dramatic foundations. In L’emmerdeur the title character is suicidal, in Les fugitives we have this distraught widowed father robbing a bank to pay for his daughter’s care, in The toy the child king mourns the loss of his mother and missing father, etc.
Where does this tendency to create the hilarity of gravity come from? Possibly from childhood, judging by the opening lines 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 that makes a comedy. »
Be that as it may, Pignon lives in great solitude at Le Diner de Cons, hence his disastrous attempts to become indispensable in the eyes of Brochant. Brochant is finally condemned to this loneliness when his wife dumps him with an involuntary nudge from Pignon. Pignon, who beneath his harmless exterior could almost be the little brother of Nemesis, the goddess of divine vengeance…
A recurring character in Francis Veber’s work, François Pignon (or sometimes his variation François Perrin) is now part of French folklore. As proof, this 2013 article by Figaro entitled: “François Pignon: the French’s favorite idiot”.
“He does not understand anything. And this is undoubtedly 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 all his people against his will, there is undoubtedly his unconscious genius. The perfect idiot gets everything when the others, clever, unfortunately think themselves superior when they will be the turkeys of farce. »
A description that fits the protagonist of Le Dîner de cons like a glove.
Better be an asshole
However, the philosopher, writer and activist for the dignity of autistic people Josef Schovanec offers a different reading in this regard:
“The entire script of the film is based on autism, or rather the confrontation of two worlds that function in diametrically opposed ways. There is even a nod to the history of psychoanalysis: we may have forgotten it, but European psychiatry or psychoanalysis was built up through the regular holding of public seminars, at which the practitioner brought in a ‘madman’ or ‘hysteric’, often with notable success with the general public,” he wrote in a 2017 essay published by RTBF (Belgian Radio-Television of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation).
Schovanec goes on to explain how the film made collateral sacrifices among members of the autistic community, who, with the film’s popularity, became popular guests for those gruesome “dinners.” After wondering whether or not to condemn the film, the author responds nuancedly:
“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’s up to us to reverse the paradigm and turn it into real encounters. »
While waiting to get there, we can always refer to these words of Didier Péron in Libération: “Better an idiot than a bastard. »