Earlier within the week, a group managed by the French National Cinema Centre chose Untouchable as being that country’s 2013 Oscar foreign language entry. It’s just corny enough to win. This comic drama made by Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano has a premise not dissimilar from The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, also based on a true story. But where Julian Schnabel’s rarefied exploration of paralysis is concerned, the film itself is as broad, accessible, and trombonishly unsubtle as a subtitled Driving Miss Daisy.
In France Les Intouchables for so it is known there stands as the second highest grossing domestically produced film of all time, Omar Sy won best actor at the 2012 César awards for it over The Artist’s Jean Dujardin. Having ensured Dujardin his Oscar, seasoned campaigners Bob and Harvey Weinstein brought this picture to America with a strange, half-translated title (The Intouchables) and have now signed and sealed rights to an English language remake. This week, it will be released in translation in the UK.
Untouchable wears its award-winning aspirations on its sleeve, all three necessary boxes boundary-crossing friendship, hard-hitting themes, warm comedy are ticked with fluorescent pink marker pen. François Cluzet, perhaps best-known here for muscular thriller Tell No One, plays Philippe, an eccentric quadriplegic millionaire living in Paris who wants to be cared for by someone other than “be cardigan ed milquetoasts”. So he advertises for a carer and hires Driss (Sy), a strapping black immigrant from the banlieues who only applied for the post to keep the benefits office sweet.
Almost immediately these two men strike up mischievous camaraderie. Driss, essentially good but in need of stability, loves his new home with all its trappings, we see him lurking around in the free standing bath and carousing with exotic women in his wood-paneled apartment. (Maybe this sequence didn’t need to be so strenuously underscored by jazz funk standard The Ghetto.) Meanwhile, Philippe relishes his new carer’s lust for life, absence of pity, and ready access to marijuana. Driss also tirelessly flirts with Philippe’s secretary Magalie (Audrey Fleurot) and strikes up a warm, platonic friendship with Yvonne (Anne Le Ny), who works as another live-in helper.
These are not great dramatic roles, just conduits for charisma, but the horseplay between Sy and Cluzet is often very funny, and one joke bounces merrily into the next. A gag about Driss confusing his employer’s shampoo and foot cream starts with a terse exchange about the lack of lather in Philippe’s hair, cue a brief follow-up shot of his feet swathed in suds. The dialogue has also been translated for maximum mainstream impact regional jokes have been paraphrased to include US-friendly punchlines involving the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Justin Bieber.
Much of the humor is inevitably built on stereotypes; one sequence, where the servant boogies to Earth, Wind & Fire while his master looks on approvingly, has caused disgruntlement in some quarters. (One normally even-tempered American critic described Driss as a “performing monkey”.) But Untouchable isn’t really a film about race or disability or anything other than friendship my (perhaps generous) reading of this scene is an older man who cannot dance looking first enviously, then joyously at a younger man who can.
The moral of Untouchable is positive in nature and can be considered conservative as well. According to it, if you entrust a person with some duties then he will surely fulfill them with utmost care. Consequently, he may even abstain from using marijuana or getting caught for over-speeding while driving occasionally. This movie doesn’t have the power to revolutionize everything like other films do, but it has the potential to captivate people around the globe.
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