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Pierre (Charles Berling), a university prof who wears corduroy “like his second skin,” and his wife Elizabeth (Valérie Benguigui), an eternally optimistic middle-school teacher, are hosting a small dinner party for three guests. Claude (Guillaume de Tonquedec), a single and successful trombonist, has been best friends with Elizabeth since their childhood. Her carefree brother, Vincent (Patrick Bruel), is also joining along with his pregnant wife, Anna (Judith El Zein). All hope for a quiet and casual gathering is thrown violently out the window when the night becomes a highly combustible, Mediterranean food-fueled fracas among friends and family. The fireworks start innocently enough when, with Anna running late, Vincent entertains guesses from the others as to what they’ve decided to name their unborn son. They all come up short leading him to reveal a name that quickly moves the room from incredulous to enraged. The ensuing argument triggers a spate of insults, insinuations...

By Any Other Name: Patellerie & Delaporte’s Debut a Comfortably Forced Farce

Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre de La Patelliere’s co-directorial debut, What’s in a Name? is a comfortable, graciously performed adaptation of their hit, one-setting stage play about a volatile dinner party, and, in fact, has become one of the biggest blockbusters in the history of French film. Breezy, intellectual sparring that’s an equal mix of comedic timing and dark realizations amongst its five characters, the film manages to avoid feeling like a play on film, but its likeness to other, superior films dealing with similar familial unrest around the dinner table lends it a rather tired air, especially considering its insistence on easily attained resolution.

A mistaken pizza delivery brings us to the home of a professor, Pierre (Charles Berling) and Babu (Valerie Benguigui), his school teacher wife. She’s preparing a Moroccan cuisine for what...

What's in a name, when that name is Adolphe? Four characters at a dinner party — a fortysomething married couple and the wife's lifelong friend and brother — debate that very question for half an hour when one of them, soon-to-be father Vincent (Patrick Bruel), announces that it will be the name of his future child.

"My son will be a great guy," boasts Vincent. "He'll beat fascism. He'll break Hitler's monopoly [over that name]." The arrival of little Adolphe's mother (Judith El Zein) instigates another half-hour debate, this time about whether Élisabeth and Pierre (Valérie Benguigui and Charles Berling), the married couple, were too precious in naming their children Apollin and Myrtille.

The premise of parents attacking each other for their t...