Olivia Wilde's third feature film (after the hilarious the hilarious Booksmart and the uneven Don't Worry Darling) dismantles the myth that the original is always better than the copy. Wilde and her team of screenwriters (two excellent comedic actors, Rashida Jones and Will McCormack) imbue the text of Cesc Gay's play, The People Upstairs, and its film adaptation, its film adaptation, Sentimental, with breakneck speed and contagious energy. The story is the same: two couples of neighbors, a single space, a married couple's apartment, and a very indecent sexual proposition. But the script variations by Wilde and her team, as well as the dizzying speed of an edit that accelerates the characters' clashing reactions, transform The Invitation into a neurotic comedy that recalls an era of American cinema, that of films by Elaine May, Paul Mazursky, and Mike Nichols, where the comedy genre also served to address adult issues; in this case, the questioning of marriage and heterosexual romanticism.

When the English adaptation of Sentimental (2020) fell into Olivia Wilde's hands, several international versions of this Cesc Gay film had already been released. The filmmaker read the script convinced that there had to be a universal component in a story that interested so many cultures. "And I thought", she explained this Saturday at the Locarno Film Festival during the presentation of "The Invite, the North American remake she directs and stars in, "it's clear, it turns out that relationships are impossible in all languages. And that everyone faces the same question: how do you live with another person? Is it possible to grow next to someone you may have ended up disconnecting from? I think it's a very moving observation, and I loved that in "Sentimental was explained with so much humor".