What is Holocaust denial? Jacques Fonzic would reply: “Don’t settle for the official version. Now, who is Jacques Fonzic? He is the one who asks the inconvenient questions. He is the one who poses as a victim. He is the one who lurks in the shadows. He’s the man in the cellar. This cellar that he bought from Simon Sandberg, telling him that he wanted to store personal belongings there before moving in. It’s only too late that Simon and his family learn the truth about their new “neighbor”. He is a history professor expelled from the profession for having, among other things, questioned the Holocaust. Thus, the conspiratorial wolf has entered the Parisian sheepfold and he will sow discord with his words.
It took almost ten years for Philippe Le Guay to overcome this scenario. First, because the plot does not come out of nowhere. This misadventure, to put it mildly, happened to friends of the director. This Jewish couple had sold their cellar without knowing it to a neo-Nazi, notorious Holocaust denier, who then moved there. It took two years of procedures to dislodge the individual. Le Guay therefore felt a certain responsibility towards his friends. Secondly, because he had to find a way to approach a subject as delicate as Holocaust denial.
The filmmaker, rather accustomed to comedy, had the skill to portray Holocaust denial as an indirect, obscure threat. First by this gloomy cellar, in the middle of the dark and disturbing maze of the basement. In front of Le Guay’s camera, the shadow would almost come to life and the director makes it an emanation of Fonzic, of his malicious remarks. However, he does not pronounce them himself. His most outrageous words come from the mouths of the other characters. This illustrates the hold that negationist remarks can have on individuals, while remembering that none of us is immune to being influenced by this type of discourse, whether by rallying to negationism or on the contrary by turning to the excesses of political correctness. The microcosm of the building reflects society quite well.
install psychosis
Like this continual handheld camera, nothing is stable in the heads of the characters, in whom psychosis gradually sets in. The paw of the co-screenwriter and former clinical psychologist Gilles Taurand is undoubtedly not foreign to the credibility of the manipulation that Fonzic exerts on this small world. The more the film progresses, the more the perversity of its strategy is revealed.
This is where the problem lies. The scenario turns out to be unbalanced. The meticulous work that has been done for the Holocaust denier’s actions finds no equal in the opposing forces. If the character of Bérénice Bejo makes it possible, through her research, to give a face to the victims of the Holocaust, the presentation that Renier makes of them has more the flavor of an infantilizing lecture.
We also regret that the parallel between Holocaust denial and conspiracy is only barely touched upon in this film which barely lacks public utility. The clap at the end is careful not to show us the drifts into which the negationist — and by extension conspiratorial — spiral can lead the most malleable minds, such as that of the adolescent daughter of the Renier-Bejo couple. Le Guay does not go far enough in his approach, yet oh so commendable, and leaves us wanting more.
The writing, despite its flaws, serves on a platter a golden role for François Cluzet who plays an admirably harrowing Jacques Fonzic. Always on the edge, the actor takes the viewer from discomfort to pity in the blink of an eye. His shadowy, ghostly-looking character is all the more menacing in that it gives him the air of an Everyman, with a side just unhealthy enough to remind us that we are all capable of the worst.