Suddenly, a Funny Thing Happened

Unless they’re the derisive kind that greet the thudding fiascoes that appear here more often than you’d think, laughs are often hard to come by at the Cannes International Film Festival. This year, however, humor is definitely a presence.

The best-received so far of the films in competition for the Palme d’Or is “All About My Mother” (“Todo Sobre Mi Madre”), writer-director Pedro Almodovar’s fluid combination of comedy, emotion and deep-dish melodrama involving, among others, a pregnant nun, a heroin-addicted lesbian actress and a transvestite father with AIDS. It sounds crazy, it is crazy, but it may be the popular Spanish filmmaker’s most completely realized film to date.

The most pleasant surprise of the noncompetitive films is the Belgian “The Carriers Are Waiting” (“Les Convoyeurs Attendent”), a decidedly offbeat, disarmingly funny, melancholy comedy in the Directors Fortnight. A first film from writer-director Benoit Mariage, it shows what happens when an obsessive, hot-tempered father tries to turn his teenage son into the door-opening champion of the world.

But the funniest film in the festival, and the subject of the festival’s most unexpected tribute, is scheduled for Tuesday night when “The Dinner Game” (“Les Diner de Cons”) will be shown at the Palais du Festival and its writer-director, Francis Veber, will receive an official Cannes hommage at a black-tie dinner afterward.

“When I received the call from the festival I was so surprised I fell on my ass,” says the engaging and genial Veber, who looks considerably younger than his 61 years and has a sharp sense of humor. “Why the tribute now? Maybe they’ve seen my tests for cholesterol and sugar, and they think I will die soon.”

Though he’s almost unknown to American art house devotees, Veber is likely the most widely popular filmmaker of his generation in France. He has written and directed eight films since 1978 (and penned some 20 more before that); his major hits include “The Tall Blonde Man With One Black Shoe,” “La Chevere,” “Les Comperes,” “Les Fugitifs,” and a shared credit for “La Cage Aux Folles.”

Yet until “The Dinner Game” (the most popular film in France in 1998 except for “Titanic”), none of Veber’s many works have been shown before in Cannes. “Yes, that troubled me, but I’m used to it now,” he says. “Comedy is not the best vehicle for being in festivals. It’s more prestigious to give difficult movies to sophisticated audiences, and some reviewers reach for machine guns as soon as a comedy appears. Without comparing myself to them, because they’re geniuses, Marcel Pagnol and Sasha Guitry were treated with a little contempt as ‘just funny people.’ ”

“The Dinner Game,” however, changed all that. Scheduled for U.S. release by Lions Gate in July (and an eventual remake by DreamWorks), “Dinner’ was not only a huge success at the box office, it won three Cesars (the first for a Veber film): two went to actors Jacques Villeret and Daniel Prevost and one to the writer-director for his screenplay.

A Buddy Picture With a Twist

Like almost all of Veber’s films, “The Dinner Game” is a variation on a buddy theme. “Romantic comedy died when people didn’t have to wait 90 minutes before they could kiss,” the director explains. “But when you put a cat and a dog in the same bag and they end up friends, I like that very much.”

The film’s plot involves a dinner hosted by upper-crust Parisian snobs. Each of them is charged with bringing as their guest the biggest idiot they can find for the amusement of the group. In Veber’s film, one such snob (Thierry Lhermitte) is forced by circumstances into letting his particular idiot (Villeret) into his world and then has to stand by almost helpless as the man slowly but inexorably wrecks his life.

Clever, amusing and structurally sophisticated, “The Dinner Game” builds imperceptibly, inch by inch, until it gets completely out of control and comes to involve the most zealous tax inspector in all France (Prevost). It’s a classic farce, and once you get into its spirit, it’s irresistible.

But, Veber would have you know, this kind of comedy is much more difficult than making other kinds of films. “To try and make people laugh, it’s a nightmare,” he says, chuckling despite himself. “When you look at it, it’s like a soap bubble, but one made with a sculptor’s chisel. People say, ‘It’s a bit silly, but fun’; they don’t know about the nights spent struggling to find the structure.

“I have five or six people I call my victims, people I ask to read my first drafts, and when I call them up they say, ‘Oh, no.’ The suffering of seeing people not laughing, you don’t have that with a tragedy. No one cares if people are not crying enough.”

Though Veber has his American fans (novelist John Irving told him he’s seen “Les Comperes” 20 times and uses it to cheer him up when he’s sad), his French originals suffer the unhappy fate of most subtitled movies in the U.S. market. “We all dream of doing what [Roberto] Benigni did with ‘Life Is Beautiful,’ ” he says, smiling. “If I’d known that, I would have put the Holocaust in ‘The Dinner Game.’ ”

Because his films are comedies, many of Veber’s works have been remade by Hollywood, but with the exception of “Birdcage” and “Three Fugitives,” they have not, as the filmmaker well knows, done particularly well with American audiences. Misfires include “Buddy, Buddy,” “The Toy,” “Pure Luck” and “Father’s Day,” which Veber didn’t even see because “I was scared to be sad.”

Part of the problem, Veber says, is that as “the little French writer who did the first film,” he is rarely asked to be closely involved in the remake. Also, “when a producer buys a French film, he sees it so often he gets used to the jokes. He prefers the new jokes 12 teams of other writers, a generation of Kleenex writers, bring in--he finds them fresher and funnier. So the new film has two levels of humor, like creme chantille poured on goose liver: It’s too rich and they don’t fit together. The poor film at the end is a strange thing.”

He Understands the Rules of the Game

Despite this, Veber is hardly down on remakes. “Movies are made to be seen, and if you really want to be seen by Americans, by the Anglophone audience around the world, you can’t escape remakes,” he says. “If you’re a boxer, the European title doesn’t mean much. You have to fight for the title in the U.S. to be the real world champion. It’s frustrating, but it’s life, and you can’t change the rules of the game.”

Neither is Veber down on Hollywood. In fact, he and his family spend much of their time in a house in the hills above Sunset Boulevard, a legacy of the six years he worked as a comedy consultant to Disney during the Jeffrey Katzenberg years. “People in France think Los Angeles is parties with cocaine being used around swimming pools, but people go to sleep early there. I lead a quieter life in Los Angeles than in Paris, and it’s where I wrote ‘The Dinner Game.’ ”

In the odd way that things often work, it was a bad experience with Hollywood that led to the great success of “The Dinner Game.” Convinced by then-Universal production head Tom Pollack (“My head was swelling so much after talking to him I couldn’t get out of the office; I thought I had the Midas touch”) to direct the Matthew Broderick-starring “Out on a Limb” from a script he did not write himself, Veber considers the finished work “the most horrible film ever done.”

Traumatized about the movies after that experience and “very cold in Hollywood,” Veber “remembered that I was a stage writer first” and wrote “The Dinner Game” as a play based on a real gathering of snobs in an exclusive Parisian nightclub called Castels. It played in Paris for three years, and despite Veber’s belief that it was too stage-bound for a film, veteran producer Alain Poire (who’s about to mark his 60th year with the French film company Gaumont) decided to do it anyway.

Steven Spielberg was entranced with “The Dinner Game” both as a concept before the play was written and as a finished film, and a DreamWorks remake is in the works. Veber would like to direct but only if “the writing is satisfactory; I don’t want to fail--it’s not useful and I did that already.” His dream cast includes Robin Williams as the idiot and either Kevin Kline or Steve Martin as the snob, and he already knows what qualities will make that film a success.

“My religion when I’m directing a comedy is for the actors to be the most sincere and serious as possible, as if they were in a real situation. With a film like this, it’s also a question of pace, tempo. It’s like a trick: If it’s not good, it’s sad--but if you succeed, it’s magic.”