Gaul, gall

Le cinéma à la française

There's the France that makes me envious, the mad mad nation of advanced cinephilia, where crowds line up for Iranian movies, where every regular person you meet seems to know intimately the American oeuvre of John Ford and Nicholas Ray and (yes) Jerry Lewis and being a total film freak is unapologetically normal. There's also, simultaneously, the bourgeois, coiffured France of hack, middle-of-the-road taste, the La cage aux folles people, whose choice for a rare cinema night out is "something very French." Translation: a sub-Neil Simon domestic farce of the Le Sex Shop variety: banal, cliché'd, drearily conventional.

The Dinner Game (opening at the Kendall Square this Friday) was written and directed by Francis Veber, the author of La cage aux folles, and it's the latest, most successful ever example of France's so-called "boulevard comedy" genre. This amazing-grossing movie actually rivaled Titanic for French box office in 1998, and it could succeed with the more mainstream among the subtitled crowd in the USA. But to this turned-off American, The Dinner Game is so bland and enervating that even a Hugh Grant should stay away.

Veber's story: a bunch of rich Parisians indulge in base, frat-guy humor by inviting real-life "idiots" to a private supper and then laughing at their unsuspecting, boorish guests. Par example, a visitor obsessed with Australian boomerangs spends the whole evening soliloquizing about aboriginal weaponry while his hosts, feigning deep interest, chortle behind his back. Among the patronizing crew is handsome publisher Pierre Brochant (Thierry Lhermitte, the oft-cast Cary Grant of "boulevard" comedy), who looks high and low for a fabulous "idiot" with which to impress his pals. The search ends with François Pignon (Jacques Villeret), whose specialty is building miniature bridges and Eiffel Towers out of matchsticks and glue. Won't Pignon be willing to come to dinner and talk about his amateur art?

The Dinner Game began as a Parisian stage play, which then playwright Veber situated in the publisher's svelte apartment. Seemingly to ensure that his comedy could be confined to one set, Veber contrived to have Brochant throw out his back. Forced to stay home, the publisher never gets to the "idiots" party; instead, Pignon comes to him and causes havoc. Ha! Ha! Ha! Imagine the bull-in-a-china-shop comic possibilities when a blundering "idiot" rubs against a guy with a bad back. There's a lot of that in the movie, and it's fleshed out with by-the-numbers farce: Pignon mixing up Brochant's estranged wife and ditsy mistress; Pignon accidentally inviting in a tax collector who looks suspiciously at Brochant's unreported worldly wealth.

Molière this isn't, or Rules of the Game. Blue-eyed Thierry Lhermitte is a lightweight leading-man fixture in France, but he doesn't especially translate. Jacques Villeret is far more a mystery to me as the "idiot," funny-looking (think a balding, porcine butcher wrapping up some innards) in lieu of funny. He makes faces and says dumb things on the telephone. Pardonnez-moi, I forgot to laugh. I did groan, however, when the narrative wound down, sentimental sit-com style, with the heart-rending revelation that the "idiot" isn't really an "idiot," that goofy appearances are deceptive. Pignon's some kind of genius, this Forrest Gump of France.

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The distinctly French sensibility appears again, though in a more interestingly artsy form, in veteran Jacques Doillon's Too Much (Little) Love (this Saturday, July 24, as part of the Boston French Film Festival at the MFA). Try to imagine a serious American movie with Doillon's premise: a film director, Paul (Lambert Wilson), has received mash notes as well as a sexually explicit screenplay from a 17-year-old girl. He invites the hopelessly-in-love teen, Emma (Alexia Stresi), to come live with him at his castle in the French countryside, allegedly so they can collaborate on an improved version of her script.

Paul's see-through rationalization for a flirtation with an underage female is actually accepted by his own teenager, Lui (played by Doillon's daughter, Lou Doillon), and by Margot (Elise Perrier), his youngish wife. In America, Paul would be thrown out on his ass, and maybe the police would be brought in. In France, men are men. They need to flirt, to love, to see many women. It's their biology. And Paul, after all, is an artiste . . .

Emma arrives and of course does all kinds of damage, including bedding down Lui's boyfriend and drawing Paul away from his wife. For a time, Too Much (Little) Love is kind of fascinating, because newcomer Alexia Stresi is such a wonderful seducer, so shamelessly conniving and with Satan in her burning eyes and around her randy little mouth. Filmmaker Doillon has consciously built her character around that of Terence Stamp's devil/angel in Pasolini's Teorema, who has sex with an entire family. Stresi -- tall, lean, large-shouldered, with blond hair -- is as androgynous as Stamp, and as lethal.

But the movie eventually grows exasperating: the women in Paul's family get bruised by Emma's antics and yet they keep accommodating her. Remember Mitterrand's mistress at his funeral? Very, very French.