The wider Hong Kong public may not have rolled out the red carpet for actor Thierry Lhermitte when he arrived last week to help launch the French Cinepanorama film festival. But at the opening ceremony on Friday, where the local French community was thick on the ground, he was treated like the huge star he undoubtedly is in France.
Well-dressed matrons became quite kittenish in their efforts to exchange a few words with the man, pretty teenagers gazed longingly up at him and beaming school kids pushed autograph albums into his hands.
Lhermitte flew in to give the festival a little glamour, and also because his latest film Le Diner De Cons will be given a rare general release at UA Queensway under its English title, The Dinner Game.
Few French films make it into mainstream cinemas in Hong Kong, but local distributors Edko are confident the film can appeal to everyone, not just the usual art-house cinema crowd. The movie is laugh-out-loud funny, a comedy so successful that it was the only film in France that came close to beating Titanic at the box office last year.
The Dinner Game might finally convince the Hong Kong public that French films can be pure entertainment. There has not been a non-American foreign film that has made a big impression at the local box office for some time, and both Edko and Panasia are a little desperate.
'If this one fails,' says Audrey Lee from Edko, 'we give up on French films altogether!' One gets the sense that she is not entirely joking.
