in this lighthearted , unpretentious comedy , daniel auteuil sheds the intensity of his previous roles -- in les voleurs , ma saison préférée , manon of the spring , to name just a few -- and plays a shy , crooked-nosed accountant too boring to be tolerated by just about anyone . his françois pignon -- an appropriate name for somebody who is about to be fired , literally , for being a bore -- is a harmless placeholder who has no ambitions and no misconceptions about who he is . pignon's wife couldn't stand him and left two years ago , yet he still phones regularly to her and their indifferent teenage son . after learning that he is soon to be fired , pignon , distraught , returns home and meets that " perfect stranger " we all want to meet someday : the one who steps into our life and brings magic into it . from that moment on , the neighbor , belone ( michel aumont ) , navigates pignon's life like a chess game . belone easily persuades françois to concoct a story about his homosexuality so his boss will fear a discrimination lawsuit , superimposes photographic images and -- voila -- produces a shot of pignon in a leather-clad embrace with another man in bun-exposed pants . the photo gets sent to pignon's employer , and the events start spinning like a windmill in stormy weather , eventually changing pignon's life forever . oddly , for the rest of the story , the closet flirts with being politically correct and is as predictable as it only can be . what gives the film a tint of pleasure and saves it from being totally grotesque and improbable is that the movie never aspires to be anything more than what it is . director francis veber ( the dinner game ) finds a delightful irony in the fact that pignon has to lie that he doesn't like women in order to prove he is a man . we , of course , will learn that there is so much more to pignon than he and his colleagues could ever imagine . while watching the film , i caught myself feeling surprised that such a banal movie could actually be off-the-cuff and entertaining . the most distasteful thought in the closet is how little people really care about political correctness but how diligent they are in pretending the opposite . office politics always reveal people at their most vile : there is something unquestionably disturbing and familiar in watching petty little personalities trapped in their small trivial lives as they entertain themselves with self-made gossip and lies . besides auteuil , the acting , for the most part , is adequate . gérard depardieu , for example , starts off great as a gauche , self-righteous macho rugby couch , a racist , and a homophobe . however , as pignon gets his job back , depardieu's colleagues make him fearful for his own job for calling pignon a " fruit . " the situation becomes repetitiously improbable and depardieu is annoying and unconvincing as we learn that he might actually be the one " coming out of the closet . " michèle laroque is especially good as mademoiselle bertrand , pignon's boss , who not only discovers a real pignon and subsequently seduces him , but also demonstrates to us how smart women master the most impossible situations . though maybe not quite so impossible as this film . 
