The Closet (2001)

Francis Veber's The Closet arrives from 2001, that liminal era when a French farce could still build its entire engine on a man pretending to be gay and expect the audience to simply enjoy the ride. François Pignon, a bland accountant at a condom factory, faces dismissal until his neighbor proposes a scheme: leak photographs suggesting he is homosexual, and the company, terrified of a discrimination suit and covetous of the gay consumer dollar, will be forced to keep him. The plot then detonates in the expected directions. Colleagues find him suddenly exotic. A homophobic personnel director is ordered to befriend him and develops an obsession. A gay pride float is involved. It is brisk, it is well acted, and it treats its subject as a whoopee cushion rather than a cause.

What complicates any tidy classification is the film's evident contempt for the very sensitivities it exploits. The targets here are corporate cowardice and the panic that political correctness can generate, not the marginalized. The condom factory keeps a suspected gay man on payroll to court a market and dodge a lawsuit, which is a modest jab at institutional cynicism but hardly a class war. The gay material functions as plot fuel, a mechanism for humiliation and reversal, never as advocacy. Mlle Bertrand, the chief accountant, exists chiefly to be won in the final reel, which is how comedies of this vintage tended to close.

The supporting players are uniformly white, the concerns uniformly domestic, and the moral uniformly pragmatic: a milquetoast learns to push his way back into the photograph. There is no sermon, no climate anxiety, no reckoning with history, no body politics, no neurodivergent reading to extract. It simply wants to make us laugh at a man's invented identity and the havoc it wreaks. For a certain kind of viewer, that is either refreshing or disqualifying. The film, blissfully unaware of the question, declines to care.