le dîner de cons
I watched The Dinner Game on Sunday, finally watching a Netflix film after the two discs have been sitting around my apartment for an embarrassingly long time.
The premise is a group of friends have a dinner every Weds night and there is a contest to bring the biggest idiot. Pierre believes he has a winner in François Pignon, a Ministry of Finance worker that makes models of the world’s engineering feats out of matchsticks. Unfortunately Pierre hurts his back the day of the dinner but is too late to let François know and ends up meeting with him, and then things really get going.
It really brought a lift to my mood, as it was pretty impossible not to laugh out loud during certain moments and it was fun to watch a sort of intellectual class war take place onscreen. For instance, one of the “idiots” invited is a man that has a fascination with the boomerang and he is seen at the party, that Pierre misses, explaining the differences between modern and archaic boomerangs, and the party hosts are listening to him, apparently intently, sharing grins with one another. But the man isn’t so much an idiot as he is a nerd or a geek, he just loves boomerangs, as François loves making models out of matchsticks. Unfortunately they don’t have that warm blushy feeling that overtakes most of us when they realize they’ve been going on about Star Trek in detail for perhaps 10 or 20 minutes.. non-stop.. to someone with absolutely no interest in it.. on a date. (No wait, that’s just me) At one point, even while trying to help Pierre to a standing position after a fall, François is pestering him to guess how many matches and how many tubes of glue his Eiffel Tower model required completely unaware that Pierre couldn’t care less.
Plus, it was in French with subtitles, and I do love foreign films, especially subtitled ones over dubbed ones. Though as often happens, I completely forget I’m watching a dvd or tivo and I left the room with it running to get a snack and I could still follow what was happening from the kitchen. 3 years of French in high school pay off in strange ways.
