Le Placard (2001)
Directed by Francis Veber

Film Review

A comedy which looks as if it were engineered more for an American market than home consumption in France, Le Placard is the first film to be directed by Francis Veber since his staggeringly successful 1998 film, Le Dîner de cons.  The film was generally ill-received by critics in France but still enjoyed a reasonable (but not exceptional) commercial success in France, although it is likely to be far more successful abroad, particularly in America and the UK.

Compared with similar American comedies, Le Placard is better made, better acted, certainly better written, and probably more entertaining.  The celebrated Veber wit, which has delighted international audiences for more than two decades of French films, shows no signs of ailing, although much of the comedy in this film lacks the refinement of his earlier successes.  Disappointingly, the film sees Veber go for the obvious joke far too often, and this (coupled with a half-hearted attempted to offset the comedy with some serious scenes) slightly mars the film.  Le Placard tries to be a French comedy-drama and an American sitcom at the same time, but it just fails to achieve a happy synthesis.

The film is essentially a wry satire on office politics, which anyone who is familiar with the office environment will find hilariously funny and disturbingly true to life.  Although every situation is exaggerated for comic effect, the film's central premise that people's impression of you can very easily be altered is all too believable.   The film also offers a refreshing satire on political correctness, and ends up itself being the very antithesis of political correctness.

A cast of leading French actors that most directors can only dream of will doubtless add to the film's appeal, but this is not necessarily to the film's advantage.   Gérard Depardieu lacks the conviction and weight of his previous roles and looks as if he is re-playing Obélix in his earlier Astérix film, whilst each of the female characters in the film comes across as a shallow stereotype.  Daniel Auteuil gives a sympathetic performance as Veber's eponymous hero-loser François Pignon (the character played so brilliantly by Jacques Villeret in Le Dîner de cons), but it is probably Michel Aumont who is most impressive, giving us a moving portrayal as Pignon's helpful neighbour.   Jean Rochefort, another great comic French actor, lends the film some class which may otherwise have been lacking, whilst Thierry Lhermitte's part in the film is so insignificant as to be almost superfluous (an obvious case of Veber going way overboard with the all-star casting).

Whilst not nearly as intelligent and satisfying as Le Dîner de cons, Le Placard is overall a pleasing French comedy.  Its lack of subtlety and its obvious comic excesses will perhaps disappoint true gourmets of French cinema, but that should at least make the film accessible to a much wider audience.

Film Synopsis

François Pignon has been employed as an accountant at a rubber factory for twenty years.  His wife Christine has left him and now he learns that he is about to be made redundant.  He is on the point of killing himself when his neighbour, Jean-Pierre Belone, shows up unexpectedly and suggests one way he might avoid getting the sack.  All that François has to do is to pretend he is gay and his employers wouldn't dare give him the push, through fear of being branded discriminatory.  It's a pretty desperate measure but François's situation is pretty desperate so he agrees to go through with it.  Unfortunately, coming out of a closest which he wasn't in in the first place turns out to be a lot harder than he had imagined.

François's self-outing campaign begins by him placing a compromising photograph of himself with another man on his manager's desk.  The ruse work just as Belone had foreseen.  Kopel, François's boss, cannot risk the adverse publicity of dismissing an employee just because he is gay, but his personnel manager, Félix Santini, a raving homophobe, thinks otherwise.  When his own job is threatened, Santini is forced to change his attitude and behave in a more friendly way towards François, the result being a succession of embarrassing situations that are bound to be misinterpreted.  Meanwhile, doubts are beginning to surface as to whether François is quite as gay as he pretends to be...