Avariciously commercial French comedy of the type that tends to be remade in Hollywood. Francis Veber, its writer and director, amounts practically to a one-man factory of the type. And it's hard to see what could stand in the way of a remake of this one, a PC farce about a nebbish in the accounting office of a condom plant -- a Jack Lemmon-scented white-collar drudge -- who, to save his job, floats a rumor that he is gay, thus setting himself up as a potential martyr in the eyes of the company's best customers. (The strategy is devised by his new neighbor, an aging homosexual who, twenty years earlier, had been fired from his job because he was gay: how times change!) The consciousness-raising vein in this is not too bothersome. Rather more so is the cruel streak: the presumption that it's quite all right, quite just and proper, even quite PC, to torture and torment a macho homophobe into a nervous breakdown. Neither the consciousness-raising vein nor the cruel streak is a boon to the mirth, which scrapes along at the subsistence level. The thing, nevertheless, that elevates The Closet above mediocrity, the thing that makes it worth looking at, is simply -- how else to put it? -- that it's a thing worth looking at. A thing of beauty, even. More specifically, a thing photographed by the great Luciano Tovoli. The beauty of it springs not from the obvious and conventional source of training the camera on beautiful things: calendar-art scenery, Architectural Digest interiors, and the like. And not from the cameraman's cosmetics case of beautifying tricks: "painterly" light, pea-soup atmospherics. But instead from the beauty of the colors per se: luscious and lustrous, rich and resplendent, bright and buoyant, crisp and clean; sharply separated yet slightly diffused, softened, never harsh or garish, never violently clashing; a broad and democratic palette in which every spot on the spectrum is granted an equal independence and individuality, unsubjected to any filtering, desaturating, monochroming processes to yoke them into an unnatural "harmony" or imposed "scheme." The image is as diverse and gay (in the old way) as a balloon bouquet, as tasteful, as refined, as a Bonnard. With Daniel Auteuil, Gerard Depardieu, Michele Laroque, Thierry Lhermitte, Jean Rochefort, Michel Aumont. (2000) — Duncan Shepherd
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