• Le Placard (The Closet)

5/17/20 (Sun), Tokyo

With bars (and shops and restaurants and theaters and on and on) shut down now by the coronavirus pandemic for far too long, I was worried about a friend who runs a drinking spot in downtown Tokyo. So I suggested hosting a movie night on the big screen in his bar just for his regular customers. He liked the idea and chose this film, figuring that a light comedy would be a safe bet for the trial run. I didn’t recognize the choice at first because of the bland Japanese title メルシィ人生！(“Merci, Life!”), which could apply to hundreds of films. If they couldn’t find an equivalent to The Closet (an exact translation of the French title), surely there was a more interesting alternative out there. Some in the bar speculated that the distributors may not have wanted to emphasize the gay part when the movie debuted in 2001, but this is not, after all, a gay film – the gay angle is played for laughs if anything. I wonder if their obtuseness actually hurt the film’s commercial appeal. In any case, after weeks of watching movies at home, I really enjoyed being with a group of people laughing at the same film. I’m ready to get back to the movie theaters, and I suspect I’m not alone.

My opinion is unchanged from my last viewing. Daniel Auteuil‎, who I neglected to mention last time, was fine as the timid lead. But Depardieu still runs away with the film in an uproarious performance that had the room in hysterics. ‎It occurred to me again that his return to the company after his nervous breakdown, a passing moment here, would have been played in the US as an overblown plea for tolerance for sexual minorities – the sappy lines pretty much write themselves. I love the deadpan French approach, which gives the audience much more credit.

When I mentioned after the showing that the story might make a good stage show, I was surprised to learn that it had in fact been done on stage in Japan in 2007 with Osaka comedian Akashiya Sanma. That’s interesting casting – hard to imagine the boisterous Sanma as a mousy employee, especially given his reputation as a womanizer – but it reportedly did well on the strength of his fan base. I’m curious as to what they did with it.

Here’s my original posting:

An accountant in a large company is so dull as to be almost invisible. He is ignored by his colleagues, and neither his ex-wife nor his teenage son will return his calls. Furthermore, he overhears talk that he is going to be axed by the firm. Depressed and lonely, he contemplates jumping off his building. A neighbor aims to help by concocting a scheme: he anonymously mails the company a doctored image of the guy in a leather suit with his hands all over another guy, strongly implying that he is gay. That apparent revelation makes it impossible for the company to fire him, and more than that, makes him suddenly an object of fascination for the entire firm. 

His co-workers are now convinced that they knew it all along, and the company orders everyone to be ultra-sensitive – not least the big macho guy (a priceless Gerard Depardieu) who has a penchant for casual off-color “faggot” jokes. The newly gay guy is not entirely comfortable with all this, complaining that he’s come out of a closet he was never in. He is especially bothered when his son gets caught up in the same deceit, having caught his father on television on the company’s gay pride float.

His initial impulse to tell the truth, though, fades away as his son expresses respect for him for the first time. Similarly, as people cater to him, he increasingly gains confidence, and even the hot secretary comes on to him. By the end, he is a new man.

The movie gets lost along the way in several underdeveloped subplots, but one of those is actually funnier than the plot: Gerard’s co-workers, having a bit of fun, tell him that his job is on the line if he doesn’t treat the supposedly outed guy better. The paranoid Gerard, not the brightest guy around, does everything he can to ingratiate himself to his colleague. He joins him for lunch, makes desperate attempts at small talk (such as how the after-game showers are the best part of rugby), and visits him at home bearing chocolates when he’s sick. When he buys a pink sweater as a birthday gift, his wife thinks he’s having an affair (one of those ultimately aimless subplots), but he can only obsess whether the guy really likes him or not, even worrying that he’s not wearing the sweater. Gerard is hilarious at every step of the way, and his portrayal brings the movie to a whole different level. The main guy and his secretary are both fine, but fine doesn’t compare with brilliant.

The film fortunately is not a sentimental plea to go out and love gays; that’s implicit in the story (well, a bit more explicit with the next-door-neighbor who was fired for being gay, a relatively underplayed point), but the writer is mainly using the gay angle to drive the drama. In that sense it recalls La Cage Aux Folles – which comes as no surprise, since the writer/director turns out to be one of the Oscar-nominated writers of that film as well. I dread the inevitable American remake, which is sure to veer off into poor-put-upon-gay-people territory, but this one was very much worth watching.