The Restaurant

A French comedy set in a luxury restaurant in Paris. Septime owns the place and runs its kitchen. He treats his staff with military discipline and bows far too low to the customers. The restaurant is famous. Statesmen, diplomats and journalists eat there. One night a Latin American head of state arrives. In the middle of dinner the man disappears. The police raid the restaurant. Nobody saw anything and Septime is left as the suspect. From there the film becomes a story of pursuit. Interrogations, secret services, a hotel, a mountain house and a ski resort. Septime knows nothing. But to get himself out of it he sets about investigating on his own. The humour is entirely physical. He falls down stairs, cannot ski, puts on disguises, and gets into a worse state each time. One scene is the film's best known. Septime repeats an instruction he gives his staff in a foreign language without knowing what it means. What the narrative is interested in is not espionage but hierarchy: what the film really describes is a man cruel to those below him and fawning to those above, and it repeats that in every scene. Louis de Funès's performance is the whole film. The narrative depends on him and there is nothing left when he leaves the frame. The pace is fast. The scenes are short, the cutting quick, and the film is over in ninety minutes. The plot is thin and the film is not interested in it. Louis de Funès, Bernard Blier, Venantino Venantini and María Rosa Rodríguez are in the cast. Jacques Besnard directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes classical French farce and physical comedy. Who it is not for: anyone looking for a story; the plot is only a pretext and some of the jokes have aged.