Rubber man

Francis Veber pulls French comedy out of The Closet

by Peter Keough

THE CLOSET. Directed and written by Francis Veber. With Daniel Auteuil, Gérard Depardieu, Thierry Lhermitte, Michèle Laroque, Michel Aumont, Jean Rochefort, Alexandra Vandernoot, and Edgar Givry. A Miramax Zoë release. At the Avon.

For Francis Veber, perennial director of France's funniest comedies, Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp has evolved into François Pignon. That's the name of the hangdog hero of nearly every one of his low-key, inimitable (Hollywood has been trying to copy them for ages) farces. In his 1997 film The Dinner Party (Le dîner de cons), Pignon is played by the koala-like Jacques Villeret. A hapless nerd who builds models of engineering milestones out of matchsticks, he's invited to a party of snobs to entertain them with his idiocy, but he sweetly turns the tables.

This is kind of what Veber is doing in film after film -- he invites us sadists to laugh at poor Pignon, then reveals that he's just like us, only better. Pignon is Woody Allen without the wit, the neuroses, or the cultural pretensions. Instead, he has decency, unwitting righteousness, and the long arm of poetic justice on his side.

In The Closet, Pignon is played by Gallic everyman Daniel Auteuil. Last seen in this country in the sublime The Widow of Saint-Pierre, in which he played a tragic hero with austere non-comprehension. A hardworking nondescript accountant in a condom factory, Pignon finds himself squeezed out of the company photo before the film's credits are even completed. It doesn't matter, he learns from an overheard conversation in the men's room, since he's about to be laid off anyway. What with his wife having left him because he was so boring and his teenage son avoiding him for the same reason, Pignon has little to live for.

Enter the little kitty. Yes, this filmmaker does not shrink from using a cute feline as a plot device, or a cute old man. The latter is Pignon's new next-door neighbor, Belone (Michel Aumont), who uses the stray cat as a ploy to get into Pignon's apartment and talk him out of suicide. Belone has a helpful suggestion: why doesn't Pignon start a rumor that he's gay? Then his bosses -- this is a condom factory, after all -- wouldn't want to incur bad publicity by firing him.

Not only do the rumors save Pignon's job, they somehow make him more . . . interesting. The genius of Belone's plan is his insistence that Pignon change absolutely nothing about his appearance or behavior: people's expectations and prejudices will do the rest. From the titillating gossip exchanged by the two women who work with him in the accounting office to the quandaries of Félix (Gérard Depardieu in a comic tour de force), a homophobic jock now fearing for his job, to the renewed attentions of his estranged wife and son, Pignon's whole world is upended for the better through the agency of an "anonymously" sent doctored photo. And in the comic aftermath of this lucid chaos (Veber's direction is so crisp you hardly notice the eloquence of the visuals, the employment of space and setting with the ingenuity of Jacques Tati), the film quietly makes its shrewd points about issues ranging from sexual identity to sexual harassment. It's a minor breakthrough in the cause of tolerance along the lines of Veber's La cage aux folles.

All of which could -- and at rare moments of weakness in The Closet does -- trespass into formulaic platitude. The comedy of reversed expectations, as Veber knows well, works best when its own expectations are reversed, or at least fulfilled in surprising ways. Just as the satire of social stereotypes, of the invidious habit people have of judging by appearances, imparts a special sting when the audience's proclivity in that direction gets tweaked as well.

Thus Veber arranges for Félix, the film's least sympathetic character, to be transformed through a cruel ploy conceived by fellow worker Guillaume (Thierry Lhermitte, the arch snob from The Dinner Game), and through the intercession of a pink sweater, into the film's most touching object of pathos, into a virtual Pignon himself. Less successful is the transformation of Mlle. Bertrand (Michèle Laroque), who goes from suspicious indifference to a display of affection that becomes a big endorsement of the company's product to a passing tour of Japanese investors. Veber's comedies remain all-boy affairs; if he really wants to get out of the closet, he needs to realize that Pignon can be a woman, too.