The Restaurant (1966)

Here we have a 1966 French farce in which Louis de Funès runs a grand Parisian restaurant, bullies his staff, fawns over the wealthy, and watches a Latin American president vanish in a cloud of flambéed sugar. The plot then repairs to the Alps for a snowbound chase. This is cinema as confection, and it is presented to us with the sober craft of a pastry chef who has never once been asked to justify the calories.

The film's cultural inventory is, by the standards we now apply, remarkably bare. The ensemble is uniformly European. The fictional republic and its revolution serve as slapstick furniture, a running gag about national anthems and misplaced heads of state. The single prominent woman is a dutiful aide in a kidnapping plot. Nobody in the Alps pauses to interrogate capital, or the climate, or the body, or the mind. Monsieur Septime's sycophancy toward his paying guests is offered as a joke about restaurant culture, not an indictment of the owning class. In 1966 nobody thought to ask a comedy for a thesis, and the comedy, to its credit, had none to hand over.

The picture's only agenda is the precise timing of a collapsing dessert trolley. It is a machine built to produce a laugh, then a second laugh, then a third, and it never once turns to address the audience about how to live. Whether that constitutes artistic poverty or artistic hygiene will depend entirely on the viewer's appetite. I record it, as is my duty, and move along. The soufflé explodes twice. So, in the end, does nothing else.