Since it’s Louis de Funès’ 106th birthday (and la Cinémathèque
française are celebrating him with a year long retrospective!), I thought I’d
revisit my first - and maybe favourite - film of his, “Le Grand Restaurant”
(1966). de Funès has the happy talent of being such a wonderful character comic
while also embodying the chaotic slapstick of his Keatonesque forbears. His
beloved characters are Arthur Lowe-like in their tetchy arrogance and
impatience, but he also possesses an additional mercurial energy of little
rage, and a delightfully foolish self-image, alternately (ridiculously,
laughably, endearingly) fawning and (tremblingly, anxiously, meekly)
overwhelmed - physically, verbally, visually a delight, made even more so by
the wonderful talent that surrounds him in every picture, such a joy to behold
:’) In this film, the president of a fictional South American nation visits
Paris and insists on dining at Septime’s while he’s there, but does missing
during an unfortunate accident with an explosive tropical dessert. Septime is
accused of kidnapping le président before becoming reluctantly involved in an
entertaining plot to bring him back.
The plot meanders quite a bit, and the
ending is refreshingly sweet for something in the line of a spy thriller, but
maybe the bigger highlights for me are a long line of restaurant jokes as
Septime fawningly attends to his patrons, suspiciously picks on and watches his
staff, trains them on the ideal waiterly comportment, disguises himself to find
out what they really think of him, and makes inexplicably hilarious kissing
noises to get people's attention. And my favourite - that incongruous chaos and
comic pace that characterises everything I adore about comedy of the decade -
is when the staff suddenly break into a wild dance in the middle of their
'rehearsal,' seemingly by accident, haha. Hopefully up soon, as a kind of Part
2 to my own little retrospective, will be another personal desert-island
favourite from the same year “La Grande Vadrouille”! Xo
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