For many people, having the boss over for dinner is stressful enough, but now imagine you haven't even gotten the job yet, that the dinner is the interview and that you haven't a single social grace in your unemployed body. Such is the premise of French farce The Dinner guest.
Gerard is a manufacturer of food wrapping who has been out of work for three long years - time he's spent playing with model trains. His wife Collette is just as lazy, using her days to become the perfect brain-dead 1950s frump. Only their neighbour, an image consultant named Alexandre, has any verve. He quite kindly offers to help them prepare for the big dinner. He starts by re-decorating their drab flat with modern art, getting rid of their gauche pop records and preparing a sophisticated, impressive meal.
Director Laurent Bouhnik and writer David Pharao go way too far in deriding their main characters. How believable is it that Gerard would be so oafish as to fall in the bath in his only good suit? Or that Collette would think serving wine in a beer stein is acceptable? She's French, after all.
The filmmakers make the mistake of reducing this couple to unsympathetic morons and compound the error by giving them little funny to do. And with so much rapid-fire dialogue that doesn't amuse, this qualifies as a screw-bore comedy.
We've seen Daniel Auteil play this middle-class schlub too many times and Valerie Lemercier has a thankless role as the hausfrau. Thierry Lhermitte injects some wit into Alexandre, but we wonder why this chap would bother to help this dimwit duo.
If you can stick with it, The Dinner Guest does serve up a final, ironic twist that has some bite. But because it's also a final sneer it leaves a sour aftertaste.
This is one RSVP to which you can safely reply “non” and The Dinner Guest rates two stars.
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