The Intouchables Touches Down In The U.S.

This is a lovely film. By turns, it manages humor, sadness, reflection, and humanity…and then cycles back through those elements over and over again. The Intouchables presents the story of an unlikely relationship between wealthy tetraplegic Phillipe (François Cluzet) and his inexperienced, convict caretaker (Omar Sy). Fraught with far less dramatic tension than you might think from that description, the film derives all its power from the lead performances of Sy and Cluzet. Their relationship is a wonderful thing to behold over the course of the film; there are tears, laughs, car chases, paragliding, and dancing. There are lots of silly montages that I would scoff at in other films. But not in this one. I allow this film as many montages as it wants. It’s that kind of film.

A still from The Intouchables, with Omar Sy (left) and François Cluzet (right); via nytimes.com

There’s a weird irony in that the three great French film imports to the U.S. since the beginning of the new millennium have been consumed more like pastries than fine French reds. Sorry, that’s a bad metaphor. What I mean to say is that, once upon a time, the French imports—À bout de souffle and The 400 Blows among them—were more like cultural revolutions in their impact on the landscape of American film. They changed Hollywood forever; these three films—Amélie, The Artist, and (soon) The Intouchables—are light and easy on the mind. While some people (I mean me) are of a mind that a lingering darkness intrude on Amélie’s world, many viewers are of the mind that it’s just sunny entertainment. And, setting aside the question of whether or not it deserved all those Oscars, who didn’t enjoy The Artist? It was one of those films that went down easy. The same thing might be said of The Intouchables, which, while it ponders some deep, dark questions, skips light-heartedly down the road to comedy once it arrives at the proverbial tragic-comic fork in the road. Which is okay with me! Just not with some people…

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*Some spoilers follow. There are always naysayers. In the case of The Intouchables, Variety’s film critic Jay Weissberg stepped up to the plate to cut down the film’s buoyant feel-goodness to size. The film, he argues, engages in “the kind of Uncle Tom racism one hopes has permanently exited American screens.” He jokingly speculates that executives at Weinstein, who bought the American rights to the film, would have to endure some serious rewriting for the film to work for American moviegoers. He finds Phillipe’s birthday party scene particularly hard to stomach. Driss, who has just been subjected to a survey of the standard classical music repertoire by Phillips, trots out an .mp3 player with speakers and promptly plays Earth, Wind, and Fire’s “Boogie Wonderland.” That moment of cultural collision, according to Weissberg, places Driss in a “role barely removed from the jolly house slave of yore, entertaining the master while embodying all the usual stereotypes about class and race.”

But what Weissberg overlooks is the abundantly clear problem of ethnocentrism. It’s especially easy when it comes to the film world to assume that the U.S. (indeed, Hollywood) is the center of everything. But that’s simply not the case. People make films from across the world and they do not always conform to our cultural expectations. If someone made an American version of The Intouchables, based in, for example, New York City, then it would certainly come across as having some racist undertones. However, wrapped up in Weissberg’s assessment that Weinstein will “need to commission a massive rewrite to make palatable this cringe-worthy comedy” is the stinging assumption that Americans are somehow ‘fairer’ and, indeed, less racist than our neighbors across the Atlantic.

The situation calls for an application of what cultural critic Edward Said termed “contrapuntal reading.” Though it complicates the viewing/reading/listening experience in a myriad of ways, Said offered a method of engaging with artwork not only on our own terms, but also on the perceived terms of other cultures. It’s a complicated system and Said explains it better than me. (Learn more about it from a clever English student here.) The lesion is that we need to look at The Intouchables not as a film in U.S. theaters, but as a French film in U.S. theaters. This is a crucial difference.

Personally, I’m not familiar with issues of race and ethnic identity in Paris and France, so I feel uncomfortable commenting on how The Intouchables stands with regard to social issues on the other side of the pond. All I can safely say is that the film certainly makes no comment on race and ethnic identity in the U.S.; the background of slavery and the civil rights movement are not parts of Driss's character. Weissberg is free to point out that the film may well not succeed in American theaters and that moviegoers may overlook the nuances of ethnocentrism and proclaim it as racist spectacle, but the film’s intent remains far away from anything American.

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Weissberg’s commentary does highlight one important aspect of the film (important in both French and American terms, I mean): the play between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. The soundtrack jumps from Vivaldi to Earth, Wind, and Fire without skipping a beat. Modern art is beaten down only to be built back up again (and again dismantled, of course). Weissberg makes it sound as if the confrontations between Driss and ‘high’ art (and those relatively less frequent ones between Phillipe and ‘low’ art) are somehow without any resulting value. But these confrontations (besides the hilarious opera scene) open up important avenues of inquiry: why else would Driss pick up a brush and start painting? It’s not a mocking gesture; when Driss reveals his painting to Phillipe, he is sincere in his search for acknowledgement.

But the most important scene about art occurs when Driss goes in for a job interview at a shipping company after ending his stint with Philipe. Noting Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory on the wall, he comments on it to the interviewer. The mention of the painting is like the lifting of a fog; I can find no way to explain it other than that the conversation ‘opens up’ after that. Art allowed for a dialogue; it allowed for connection. If The Intouchables has a lesson buried in it, it’s the lesson that any art—high or low, big or small—has the power to transform and change. All it takes is an observation: here we are, there is the art. Now what to make of that?