L'Invitation (1973)
Directed by Claude Goretta

Film Review

Taking as his inspiration a stage play by Michel Viala entitled Les Médiocres, Swiss film director Claude Goretta crafted one of the cruellest and cleverest social satires of the 1970s, although its sublime gentility masks the savagery of its author's critique of bourgeois society.  On the face of it, L'Invitation is a modest comedy of manners, somewhere between Luis Buñuel's Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie (1972) and Woody Allen's A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy (1982), daintily sifted through the fine sieve of Swiss restraint and decorum.  It takes one bunch of people and puts them in an unfamiliar setting, with predictably comical results.  The people in question are an odd assortment of colleagues who have spent most of their waking lives together, without taking the time to get to know one another.  The garden party to which they are invited provides them with the opportunity to emerge from their shells and reveal their true personas to their fellow office workers - an opportunity that some embrace a little too enthusiastically, whilst other resist it with the hardened stoicism of a Victorian governess.

The film not only mocks the discrepancy between our public and private personas, that tendency we all have to put on a very different front in different social circumstances, but also the pettiness of bourgeois attitudes that stifle individuality and prevent us from showing who we really are, particularly in the work place.  When they see their host Remy's palatial homestead, most of the guests are quietly envious, but the two who are most offended are his managers, who regard this as an affront to the social norms on which their fastidious little lives are built.  Humble office employees do not live in sumptuously appointed palaces set in acres of verdant splendour.  Humble office employees do no employ exotic manservants that dispense alcohol as freely as water.  As the ice starts to break and inhibitions begin to melt away, those at the top of the office hierarchy look on in bewilderment, like aristocrats witnessing the first days of the French Revolution.  The slightest indiscretion is seen as one more step towards an orgy of debauched excess, and in the end the bosses have to step in and bring a halt to the festivities, before things get too far.  There is only so much fun the lower orders can be permitted before anarchy threatens.

L'Invitation not only established Goretta's international reputation, it also helped to put Swiss cinema on the map.  It was awarded the Jury Prize at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival and was Switzerland's nomination for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 1973.  Along with much of Goretta's subsequent work, it is a film that is distinguished by its humanity, its perception and its thoughtful preoccupation with the related themes of class and identity.  Each character in the colourful ensemble is well drawn and convincingly played, although special mention should go to François Simon (the son of the French screen legend Michel Simon), who very nearly steals the film at the enigmatic manservant Émile, a kind of Jeeves-meets-Scheherazade with an aura of Pinteresque mystique.  Émile is the personification of the class-free individual that Goretta evidently wants us all to become, whereas everyone else is stuck in his or her social groove, unable to achieve true happiness and fulfilment.  Claude Goretta would follow this up with similar idiosyncratic pieces of cinema, the best known being his popular 1977 romance La Dentellière (1977), but L'Invitation shows him at his best, both as a filmmaker and as an observer of human beings.  Whilst too many writers and directors of a satirical bent clumsily lay into their targets with chainsaws and machetes, Goretta achieves far better results with a fine scalpel.

Film Synopsis

Rémy Placet is a humble office employee who has worked for the same insurance company for the past twenty years.  When his mother dies, he is given two months' compassionate leave, during which time he sells his city centre house in Geneva and acquires a much larger property, with ample gardens, in the countryside just outside the city.  Pining in solitude, he invites all of his colleagues, including his boss, to his house for a summer garden party.  Under the influence of alcohol, liberally poured by a hired manservant named Émile, the guests soon dispense with office formality and begin to reveal their true natures.  The pleasant afternoon is wrecked when the youngest guest, Aline, performs a strip tease, egged on by one of her colleagues.  The boss's deputy is outraged by the debauched turn the party has taken and lashes out with both his tongue and his fist.  The following Monday, the ensemble (minus Aline) are to be found back at their desks in their place of work, carrying on as if the tumultuous weekend party had never happened...