Happy birthday to Gérard Depardieu, who turned seventy on Thursday. A most unlikely film star and an even unlikelier French film star, M Depardieu is a shambling unkempt heavy who became an international star in the Eighties and, briefly, a Hollywood leading man with comedies like Green Card, whose view of immigration now seems surreal and quaint. I suppose we could have saluted him with Jean de Florette or Cyrano for our Saturday movie date, but I confess a soft spot for my favorite French film of the century so far, a non-stop laff riot from 2001 - Le Placard, or The Closet:
We have Francis Veber to thank for the film - one of the few Gallic filmmakers who has not spent the past two decades driving away his audience. M Veber has had his finger on the commercial pulse since La Cage Aux Folles in 1978, and a quarter-century later he inverted the thesis and scored another big hit, at least in le monde francophone. He also corralled four big French stars - Daniel Auteuil, Gérard Depardieu, Jean Rochefort and Thierry Lhermitte - all of whom gleefully seized the rare opportunity to act before large numbers of paying customers.
The Closet is the story of François Pignon (Auteuil), an accountant so dull you can feel his colleagues dozing off in his presence. At the annual company photo, he's the guy at the end who gets nudged out of frame, and nobody notices. He's bored his wife into divorcing him. He's bored his son out of his life. He can make a simple inquiry into whether anyone would like a coffee so boring that none of his workmates ever says yes. And, as he discovers by accident while in the men's room, he's now bored the company into firing him.
So he goes back to his lonely flat in a suicidal state - until a chance meeting with his new neighbor, a retired "corporate psychologist", results in a brilliant plan to save his job:
Pretend that he's gay.
That way they won't dare sack him because it'll look like discrimination.
This is Veber's wrinkle on changing times: in La Cage, a flamboyant gay man was forced to pose as a dull straight in order to be accepted; in The Closet, a dull straight is forced to pose as a flamboyant gay in order to be accepted. The neighbor cunningly fakes some photographs in which Pignon, wearing leather pants with cutaway buttocks, is caught in a compromising position with a fetching young hunk in a gay bar. Then he sends the snaps to Pignon's boss. The joke here is that Daniel Auteuil is the very acme of straight - a meek, sober-suited, taciturn, sad-eyed hangdog.
Don't camp it up, advises his neighbor. "It's especially hard playing a flamer." And he's right: one shudders to think what Robin Williams or Jim Carrey would have done with such a role. (Miramax had an American version in the works, but I've no idea what happened to it: scuttled by squishy execs, who feared GLAAD wouldn't find anything funny about culturally appropriated gayness as a workaround of homophiliac employment practices?)
At the office, the pictures arrive in the mail and within an hour have been photocopied around the building. It's assumed they've been sent by a fag-hater to damage Pignon, but, political correctness being what it is, they have, as predicted, exactly the opposite effect: they render Pignon unsackable. The chief exec (Jean Rochefort) passes them round the management meeting as the first and most pressing item of business. It's at this point we learn that it's a condom factory, and they can't afford to alienate homosexuals. "Damn that faggot!" fumes the boss. "If we fire him, we'll have every gay group on our backs."
"Better on your back," points out Félix (Gérard Depardieu), "than up your..."
But he's unceremoniously put down: Félix, a big ursine bruiser, runs the company rugby team and personnel department, and he has a hard time adjusting to a climate in which fag jokes are suddenly verboten. His fellow exec (Thierry Lhermitte) adds to his woes by telling him that in the new gay-friendly environment his job is on the line unless he does more to reach out to Pignon. Félix takes him to lunch where his attempts at breaking the ice are not always successful: "I love rugby for the showers," he says. Instructed to get Pignon a birthday present, the burly, blokey Félix buys an expensive pink cashmere cardigan, but his wife finds the receipt and complications ensue. To make matters worse, complains the hurt homophobe, "he never wears my sweater."
Pignon, meanwhile, is just as much a quiet, nondescript, whey-faced sad sack as he's always been. But, in the eyes of his colleagues, he's transformed by his gayness. Every humdrum, prosaic tic of his buttoned-down accountant's body language is retrospectively conscripted as long-time evidence of his homosexuality. His superior, Mlle Bertrand (played by Michèle Laroque with her customary allure) always regarded Pignon as a yawn when he was straight, but now finds him strangely irresistible and determines to re-orient his orientation. His boss decides he's the salvation of the company and puts him on the Gay Pride float wearing a condom for a crown: Once a drag, he's now a queen. His son sees him in the televised parade and concludes dad is way cool.
Francis Veber is not a director or screenwriter burdened by over-ambition. He knows what he does and he does it well. The comedy's as broad as Depardieu and just as endearing. You wish, around an hour in, that the director would do more with his droll premise, bounce it off somewhere new, but every sub-plot aside from Depardieu's seems to drain the picture's comic sweetness. It's hard to resist mainly because of the comic juxtaposition of that first image: the accountant's head plastered on to the gay stud's body, and the ensuing wonder of his workmates. And it does give Auteuil and Depardieu the chance for two grand comic turns, one as the nonentity who's suddenly the center of attention, the other as the blundering hearty forced to tiptoe on eggshells and demonstrate his sensitive side. Veber subscribes to the Billy Wilder thesis that in a comedy every minute over 90 counts for double. He wraps this up in 85 and leaves you laughing.
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15 Member Comments
I took your movie review to heart and rented it on Amazon Prime. It was great! Thanks for the recommendation. I keep thinking back to the Japanese visit scene, "quality testing", and the comment that they want to visit again. And, when he realizes he is happy to be rid of his wife, and shows up for the next year's picture - everything had changed.
Great picture.
He never looks like it but Depardieu can play an incredible range. A one man national thespian troupe. Please add Les Compares to laugh till one weeps comedy. Starts very serious it seems but that just sets it up. His turn at Obelix was ok, just supporting the antics in Mission Cleopatra, but that movie was the best version of any Asterix and Obelix stories to film.imo both movies lots of fun.
It's pretty embarassing (I love breaking that word apart and then I get where the word came from) what makes me crack up (no pun intended) the most when watching certain comedies, anything about butt jokes. I don't know if it's just the totally unexpected appearing on screen but I just did not expect to see the scene when the Japanese businessmen were taking their tour of the plant and lead actor and actress were getting it on. It took me until Pignon had his head crowned with the massive condom before I really found the film funny but then it all came to a non-stop laughing head for me. I'll never forget the time I was passing through Kentucky and dining with a couple of friends of mine there. The professor husband and wife were there along with the grown son. We were munching on our salsa and chips when out of the blue the husband jerks his head to the door and recognized some fellow. He said, "that guy had his finger up my butt today"! We all turned to him stunned and he replied, "he's my doctor and I had my annual colorectal exam. We all breathed a great sigh of relief. I still crack up when I think about that.
I've never been a fan of Depardieu. Likewise Jeremy Irons and Leonardo di Caprio. However, when you combine them and stir in the very likable Anne Parillaud and the quirky but oddly compelling John Malkovich along with the stolid Gabriel Byrne, you get the truly delightful 1998 version of The Man in the Iron Mask. It doesn't hurt that it has a very fine soundtrack and luscious cinematography.
The premise of the film sounds like a gay twist (behave!) on Being There, in which the most banal comments are taken as profundities: "In the garden, growth has it seasons. First comes spring and summer, but then we have fall and winter. And then we get spring and summer again." From Village Idiot to Village People. Sounds like progress...of a sort.
"Once a drag, he's now a queen."
Love the premise, and will have to rent the movie; if it's even half as good as the review it will be worth seeing.
Mark, perhaps when Daniel Auteuil celebrates his 70th birthday around this time next year (see wikipedia) you might consider reviewing "Jean de Florette" and "Manon des Sources" together: these films would have to be the most perfect study of the human condition.
Absolutely those two films, Kate!
Yes, two of my favourites, Fran.
Happy New Year!
Just noticed my type omission there. Meant to say absolutely 'loved' those two films. It has been ages, though, since I saw them. I checked Wikipedia and I was surprised to see Jean de Florette was the most expensive French film to be made up to that time.
Happy New Year back at you, Kate! It's tomorrow there, right? A little under three hours to go here.
Yes, 2019 seems pretty good so far, although 32 degrees C (90 degrees F) is too hot for my liking. The Paris Agreement should bring some relief this time next year, thankfully!
Send some warm air this way. We're freezing here in New Mexico. It gets this way once every two to three years between Christmas and the end of January. It hasn't changed much since 1990 when we moved here. Then like an overnight switch the planting starts the first of February! Go figure! Every living thing froze out in the backyard the last two nights. The water bowls we set out for the quail and cottontails are frozen solid. But the Australian Open is just a few weeks away, and some years they get miserable heat for that event. I know that since we've been watching since Patrick Rafter played. Well, I'm not going to make it to midnight, another twenty. The fireworks in the neighborhood won't disturb us. The dogs are mostly getting up in years and seem to have lost their hearing. Oh, the joys of geriatric pets!
Best Quebec comedies: Les Mâles by Gilles Carle starring Donald Pilon. Two men out in the woods for more than a year kidnap a nurse from a village and are hunted by the village men. Meanwhile another woman turns up who voluntarily stays with them. Of course the two men fight over her. Probably too politically incorrect for today but one of the funniest movies I ever saw (1971). A close second is the film Cruising Bar (1989) a tour de force by actor Michael Côté who plays four very different men trying to pick up women in a singles bar.
I watched Crocodile Dundee last night.
Breitbart was right - the left writes the scripts, songs and books, rewrites history, edits the dictionary, boils our world like frogs in the pan. Only when you look back 20, 30, 40 years at our cultural family album do we see that we have been in a slo-mo but profound revolution.
That is why "they" hate Trump: he shows us just how far, how fast, we have been screwed over.
"... a slo-mo but profound revolution."
Very true. Just one example is Roger Moore's Bond, as Mark mentioned on Rush. Movies from 4 decades ago that would shock the delicate, humourless sensibilities of your average #MeToo snowflake.
Autieul (besides being the closest I've ever found to my doppleganger) is in one of my favorite foreign films from the Netflix movie in the mail era; Girl on the Bridge. It's pretty standard as far as romantic comedies I guess, but I like the opening soliloquy, the general wit of the dialogue, and the metaphor of a relationship being somewhat like a knife throwing stunt. As long as the person throwing the knives keeps missing the person on the wheel, it's a magical thing. But if one misses, it's suddenly quite an ugly affair.