Le Placard

Plot

François Pignon has worked for twenty years as an accountant at a factory that makes condoms. Abandoned by his wife and held in contempt by his teenage son, he learns that he is about to be laid off in a round of restructuring. Despondent, he prepares to jump from his balcony when his new neighbor, Belone, an industrial psychologist, talks him down and proposes a scheme: make the company believe he is gay, so that firing him would look like discrimination.^{1 • 11 • 12}

The ruse is carried out with an anonymous letter to the director enclosing a photomontage showing Pignon, dressed in leather, being fondled in a gay bar. The effect on management is immediate: terrified of appearing homophobic, they keep Pignon on, and in a company whose product is condoms his supposed sexuality turns him into a kind of living asset to be honored.¹³ Pignon's standing among his colleagues changes accordingly, even though his own behavior has not changed at all; it is the way others look at him that is transformed.⁵

The rumor sets off a chain of complications. The personnel manager Félix Santini, a rugby-playing macho homophobe, is persuaded by the office prankster Guillaume that his own job is at risk because of his remarks about Pignon, and he overcompensates by forcing an awkward friendship on the man he had mocked. Michèle Laroque's character, the department head Mademoiselle Bertrand, becomes attracted to Pignon, leading to a sexual encounter on the condom production line under the eyes of visiting Japanese clients. Pignon also appears on the company's float at the Paris Gay Pride march, seated under a giant inflatable pink condom, an image his estranged son sees on television.^{13 • 14}

Interpretation and legacy

Readings of the satire. Commentators have disagreed on what the film targets. Some read it as a satire of political correctness in the workplace, in which management's fear of discrimination claims, rather than genuine tolerance, protects Pignon.⁹ Others note its treatment of prejudice: the critic Thomas Caldwell argued that the film shows both condescending tokenistic "acceptance" and outright hatred, while avoiding the queer stereotypes often exploited for cheap laughs.²⁰ Scholars have also identified ambivalence in its handling of homosexuality; Mary Harrod's study of French comedy describes the film's position on the question as ambiguous, and a University of California dissertation cites it as a film that "more obviously reinforces homophobic" assumptions.^{21 • 22}

An academic re-reading. Jeremy F. Lane, Professor of French and Critical Theory at the University of Nottingham, published a 2015 article in French Cultural Studies arguing that readings of the film as a simple parody of political correctness overlook its allegorical dimension: a middle-aged employee forced to simulate libidinal investments he does not possess in order to protect his job. Drawing on the economist Yann Moulier Boutang, Lane interprets this as an allegory of "cognitive capitalism," in which immaterial forms of labor, including the employee's personal affects, become a source of surplus value.²³

Place in Veber's career. Le Placard was Veber's ninth film as director and followed Le Dîner de cons (1998), reusing the François Pignon character name that Veber attaches to his hapless heroes.^{24 • 25} The Routledge International Encyclopedia of Queer Culture places it in a line of Veber comedies, from La Cage aux folles onward, that combine farce with sexual confusion, noting that Veber has been criticized by some for broad gay stereotypes and championed by others for unsettling sexual hierarchies through farcical inversion.²⁶ Although not originally written for the stage, the story was adapted for the theater in 2014.²⁴