The Closet

Writer/director Francis Veber is probably best known for La Cage aux Folles, a film about a gay man who pretends to be straight for the sake of his son. In Le Placard Veber reverses the formula and gives us Daniel Auteil as a straight man who pretends to be gay so that his son will love him. Also, so he won't lose his job at the condom factory and so his ex-wife will find him interesting again and so people will stop thinking of him as little more than a human cogwheel. Of course, this being movie-land, it all works out swimmingly, and Auteil is able to say "pretending not to like women, I became a man." If all this sounds vaguely offensive, guess again. Le Placard manages to be both slaptstick-silly and intelligently sensitive about these issues. It's also one of the wittier films of recent memory, though it never rises to greatness. Still, it's probably the best straight-man-pretending-to-be-gay story since Barbara Bush moved out of the White House.