Most movies pretend their stories are real and that we must take them seriously. Comedies are allowed to break the rules.
Civilized behavior erodes as the press and the police gather helplessly outside.
They arrive on the wrong night, or are alarmed to find the corpse of the restaurant owner in the next room, or are interrupted by military maneuvers. Dinner is the central social ritual of the middle classes, a way of displaying wealth and good manners. It was released in a year when social unrest was at its height, the Vietnam War was in full flower, and the upper middle class was a fashionable target of disdain. How different to see it again in 2000, when affluence is once again praised and envied. He spent years in political, financial and artistic exile, and many of his Mexican films were done for hire, but he always managed to make them his own, with his anarchic disrespect for authority and his jaundiced view of human nature.