Ridicule is set in a milieu where political power is wielded by those who are the most entertaining, where substance is far less important than image, and where public humiliation can be fatal. It's the court of Louis XVI in 1783, just six years before the French Revolution, but the similarities to our own era of infomercial politics help to ensure that this elegant and devastating satire does not become a stale period piece choking on its own snuff and face powder.

In the film's version of Versailles, courtiers compete for advantages in the parlors, at card games, at dress balls. As one of them notes, all manner of vice is tolerated, but wit can kill. The sharp-tongued gain renown -- and a chance to move a step closer to an audience with the king; those made to look like buffoons by the clever slink away in silent embarrassment. The courtiers revere Voltaire as the epitome of wit, but their epigrams outstrip his in cruelty while avoiding his genuine subversiveness.

So discovers the film's protagonist, Gregoire Ponceludon de Malavoy (Charles Berling), who, like Voltaire's Candide, begins as a naively optimistic rube. An engineer from the countryside, he comes to Versailles with the hope of persuading the king to fund a swamp-drainage project that will keep the peasants from dying of mosquito-borne diseases. Of course, Ponceludon soon learns that nothing bores these pre-Revolutionary aristocrats more than sob stories about dying peasants. To advance his cause, he'll need more than logic and reason; he'll need wit.

Guiding Ponceludon through the treacherous waters of court life is the Marquis de Bellegarde (Jean Rochefort), who compiles thick notebooks of humorous remarks and bitterly regrets that age has robbed him of the ability to make snappy retorts. Ponceludon also comes to seem an amusing plaything to the Countess de Blayac (Fanny Ardant), a courtesan whose combination of wit and boudoir expertise makes her particularly formidable.

In contrast to the countess is Mathilde (Judith Godreche), Bellegarde's gorgeous daughter, who shares Ponceludon's unspoiled nature, love of science (she has built a primitive diving suit), and revulsion for the court. Yet both are threatened by imminent corruption -- Ponceludon by having to play the countess's games in order to advance his agenda, Mathilde by an engagement to an aged, wealthy suitor whom she sees as the only way to fund her research.

Ponceludon and Mathilde are drawn to each other, and though their circumstances seem destined to keep them apart, each at least tries to keep the other from selling out. The aristocrats may be grotesque hypocrites who shun the human misery that makes their wealth possible, but they have great style -- much like the movie itself. Director Patrice Leconte and first-time screenwriter Remi Waterhouse maintain an air of frivolity and nastiness throughout most of the picture, only occasionally straying to such serious concerns as the plight of Ponceludon's peasants. Leconte balances the cool style of Monsieur Hire and The Hairdresser's Husband (those of his films that are most familiar to American moviegoers) with the broad comic anarchy of the farces that are his most typical works. He is aided by a canny group of actors (particularly Ardant, veteran Leconte player Rochefort, and stage actor Berling, in his film debut) who manage to find the humanity beneath all the elaborate artifice of the court.

The production is handsomely mounted and seems accurate without being petrified in amber (like another recent film set in the same time and place, Jefferson in Paris). Indeed, some of the events seem too absurd to be true. Actually, Waterhouse has drawn many of his cruel witticisms from period accounts, and a couple of the stranger events in the movie really happened, like the appearance at court of a Sioux warrior in warpaint and full Native American regalia. There is also a gentle cleric (based on a real-life figure) who teaches sign language to deaf youths and presents them at court. Watching their silent, gestured repartee, the courtiers realize that for once they are not in on the joke. Ridicule gets much mileage from its audience's realization that the aristocrats are dancing on the edge of the abyss, and that when the Revolution comes, they will not have the last laugh.