There’s
a kind of formula cinema that tends to attract the eyes of awards committees as
the year draws to its close. The formula will generally involve the following:
opposites attracting or worlds colliding, the differences between the two
expressed in appreciably simple terms, usually pop culture-related; hardships
that are allowed to register, but in some dialled-down way a less cosily
middlebrow film wouldn’t allow for; multiple montages, further smoothing
everything down; a smattering of recognisable tourist landmarks, so nobody gets
lost. Ideally, it would also involve a true story, so that those being grumpy
about the movie can be accused of stomping all over the experiences of those
involved – making the dissenting viewer the bad guy, not the filmmakers
clumsily celebrating the indomitability of the human spirit.
Olivier
Nakache and Eric Toledano’s Untouchable
ticks most of these boxes. Based on the true story of paraplegic Philippe Pozzo
di Bergo, this comedy-drama centres on the relationship between Philippe (François
Cluzet), a rich Parisian paralysed from the neck down, and Driss (Omar Sy), the
son of African immigrants from the projects, whom Philippe hires as his PA. The
two clash over music – Berlioz in the older man’s case, disco for Driss – but
soon form a bond: Philippe opens his carer’s mind to a world of wealth and
luxury, while Driss gives Philippe an earstud and a degree of excitement
hitherto absent from his life.
Occasionally,
the formula works. At its best, Untouchable
is gently funny: Cluzet (Tell No One,
Little White Lies) is a sly enough
performer to sell you on most things, though the film has life made easy for
itself by the fact Philippe can afford to skid around in Ferraris. Elsewhere,
Nakache and Toledano have to hope audiences are having too good a time dancing
in their seats to “Boogie Wonderland” not to notice, or to care, how thoroughly
ungainly their film is on the issue of race. (Once the formula is in place,
nothing else matters.)
Sy’s
charisma gets the film some way, but Driss is conceived as an uneducated savage
who chomps M&Ms in art galleries, is prepared to throttle anyone who
crosses him, sexually harasses Philippe’s secretary, and helps perpetuate an
art fraud – and we’re meant to respond favourably to all this, because he’s doing
things namby-pamby, touchy-feely carers wouldn’t. The film has compassion mixed
up with brute force; in doing so, it veers dangerously close to the suggestion
the role of this black man was simply to lend his white charge some backbone.
The
real story couldn’t have been this simple, this easy, this black-and-white –
and it turns out it wasn’t: di Bergo’s carer Abdel Sellou was of Arab descent,
further muddying the film’s already dubious racial politics. In the end,
perhaps it doesn’t matter if this repackaging doesn’t export well: the story is
now being sent down the Hollywood conveyor belt in a new, improved (now
subtitle-free!) formula, with Colin Firth in the Cluzet role. As cinema, Untouchable is indistinguishable from
baked beans in tomato-flavoured sauce: comfort food intended to warm you up, it
may yet give more sensitive consumers a regrettable case of indigestion.
Untouchable opens in London today, and in cinemas nationwide from next Friday.
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