By PETER CALDER
(Herald rating: * * * * )
The latest from the prolific French farceur who created La Cage Aux Folles, Les Fugitifs and last year's The Dinner Game is a giddy and deftly handled satire of political correctness which presses some of France's top screen talent into the service of a hilarious one-joke comedy.
Auteuil plays Francois Pignon - the moniker of all Veber's fall guys - a boring accountant in a condom factory who overhears that he's first in line for redundancy. It's significant that his first concern is to reassure his estranged wife that her alimony will not be endangered, even though both she and their teenage son despise him.
When he decides to end it all, his suicide attempt is interrupted by his neighbour, a former industrial psychologist, who suggests Pignon should come out of a closet he was never in. A condom manufacturer would never risk the bad publicity attendant on sacking a member of its major customer group, he explains. "Nothing will change except the way people see you."
The way the management deals with what soon becomes known as "the Pignon problem" is the stuff of a cleverly wrought and thoroughly modern comedy of manners. When the manager (the evergreen Rochefort) decrees that no whiff of homophobia shall taint the factory's purified air, it fills Santini (Depardieu), the resident rugby-loving, gay-bashing oaf, with fear for his own job, and he embarks on a process of self-ingratiation which looks suspiciously like courting.
What ensues is essentially a sustained exercise in dramatic irony in which pretence spawns pretence and every idea is stretched to its absurd extreme. Superbly economical - Veber's films always come in under 90 minutes and he never wrings an idea dry - the film is illuminated by Depardieu's subtle, textured performance.
Those who saw his English-language debut, Peter Weir's Green Card, already know that the incredible hulk has an instinctive command of comedy. The Closet underlines the point, and it's a hoot.
Cast: Daniel Auteuil, Gerard Depardieu, Thierry Lhermitte, Jean Rochefort
Director: Francis Veber
Running time: 83 mins
Rating: M
Screening: Rialto, from Boxing Day
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