Kitchen with Apartment

A dinner party. A couple invite their old friends; one of the guests is now a well known television personality and his wife is the hostess's old rival. The film never leaves the flat, and we stay almost entirely in the kitchen. What happens in the living room reaches us only through whoever comes back in. Philippe Muyl directs. The source is the play by Agnès Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri, who wrote the screenplay and appear in the film, alongside Zabou Breitman and Jean-Pierre Darroussin. The whole idea is that spatial constraint. The arguments, the insinuations and the humiliations happen in the other room, and we hear only the commentary of those taking refuge in the kitchen. It is a structure that comes from the stage and the film does not break it. Jaoui and Bacri built a school of their own in French cinema. How the middle class talks, jealousy, the calculation of status and the cruelty performed at a table are at the centre of everything they made; they later won Césars for Le Goût des autres. The dialogue density is high and the humour is entirely verbal. Who it is for: viewers who like French chamber comedy and sharp dialogue writing. Who it is not for: it is nearly all talk in one location, and the pace is hard to follow in subtitles.