FROM co-directors Alexandre de La Patellière and Matthieu Delaporte (who wrote the play and adapted it for the screen) comes a comedy of manners and relationships offering many reasons to laugh, among tensions the small scale of which does not diminish their intensity.

Teacher Elizabeth (Valérie Benguigui) is preparing a Moroccan dinner party. In the living room, her academic husband Pierre (Matthieu Delaporte) and trombone-player friend sInce childhood Claude (Guillaume de Tonquedec) are enjoying a vintage red brought to by her real-estate salesman elder brother Vincent (Patrick Bruel) who got it as a gift from a client. Vincent’s pregnant partner Anna (Judith El Zein) hasn’t yet arrived. The men start discussing a name for the baby.

Vincent is the principal protagonist. His behaviour is questionable from the outset and his social skills are deplorable. His eye is on the bottom line of any transaction. He’s never read a book. And he is that worst of conversation partners, a laugher at his own jokes. When Pierre and Claude ask whether he has chosen a name, he strings them along before revealing that its name will be Adolphe.

French people still have good reason to revile that name even when it’s not spelled Adolf. Leftie Pierre is furious. Gentle Claude is distressed. Elizabeth, despite having grown up in the shadow of Vincent’s crassness, is dismayed. Here is the meat for a dinner-table comedy that intensifies when Anna arrives and hears for the first time what Vincent is proposing.

Filmed almost entirely in the apartment, the ensemble cast gives first-class portrayals of characters more interested in talking than doing stuff as relationships come close to breaking point, long suppressed home truths boil to the surface and Claude, so far self effacing to a degree, delivers a kicker revelation that has Elizabeth and Vincent aghast.

Perhaps more a crowd-pleaser than a seminal exemplar of any dramatic style, “What’s In a Name” is great fun, even when being very serious. And that’s a big plus in any language.

At Palace Electric