THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – WHY NOT
There is often, in Philippe Le Guay’s comedies, the idea of a quiet life, of a routine, of a retirement, suddenly turned upside down by the arrival of an unforeseen event. We remember, for example, in Women of 6e stage, a bourgeois of the 1960s and the 16e district overcoming his deadly boredom by discovering, thanks to the arrival of the new maid, Maria, the unknown and wonderful world of Spanish domestic workers on the top floor of his own building, where he begins to spend more time than in his own apartment.
Retaining the allegory of the building as a microcosm of society, the director signs, with The man in the cellar, the nightmarish side of its whimsical Spanish. The idea of the cellar, however, preceded that of the sixth floor, but Le Guay hesitated to go down there. We understand it better by discovering the film. The Sandbergs, a mixed couple – Simon is an Ashkenazi Jew (Jérémie Rénier), Hélène Christian (Bérénice Béjo) -, decides to sell their cellar. Mr. Fozic (François Cluzet), a history teacher, introduces himself. His politeness and a visibly complicated situation for him inspire confidence. Simon gives him the keys even before signing the contract and cash the check he gives him.
It takes him badly. First of all, Fonzic, who had to be content to store things there, settles down in person in the cellar. In the second place, noting that he cannot dislodge it, Simon does research and learns that his purchaser is a figure of the French negationist environment. It is the beginning of a domestic and legal hell for the Sandberg couple who, exhausting the lawyers, neither manage to break the sale nor to dislodge the intruder. Strictly speaking Kafkaesque situation on which Philippe Le Guay capitalizes to instill a tone that spares both the disturbing strangeness (stain of dampness on the walls, the pétainiste hints of an assembly of trustees, mephitic shadows of the cellar …) and the triviality of a real estate law problem.
Uneasy oddity
The film, imbued with an uneasy oddity, combines successes and mistakes. The character of Fonzic concentrates the first. The perverse intelligence, the victim’s complaint, the call for freedom of expression, Cluzet, the dull hair and the threadbare overcoat, embodies all this with a stringy softness that works wonders. The Sandberg couple, enriched by respective families and related tensions, too sketched out to convince, is more difficult to impose.
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