One rich invalid male seeks ex-colonial subject for full-time live-in service.Must make life livable. Such is the premise of the European blockbuster comedy The Intouchables, directed by Oliver Nakache and Eric Toledano. The substitution of the Senegalese Driss (Omar Sy) for the Algerian-born author of the true story on which the film is based, Abdel Sellou, tells a great deal about what is at stake in this feel-good film: a mediation of neo-colonial guilt, of the "Other question" transformed into the terms of an urban white/black dynamic easily digestible to American (and hence pan-European) audiences. The Algeria-France question, not to mention the Senegal-France question, is transmuted into a American narrative schema: a poor black kid from the ghetto gets a job caring for a rich paralyzed man with a golden heart. The effect is, of course, a depoliticization of the relationship between Phillipe and Driss, and a reinscription of racist and classist stereotypes. Phillipe: being rich, white, French, and of the older generation alive during the Algerian revolution, naturally quotes Apollinaire, enjoys modern art, listens to classical music, but of course couldn't dance even if his legs worked. Driss: being poor, black, also French but from the projects, plays the comical philistine, who does not understand modern art, laughs in the theater, but introduces Phillipe to smoking weed and funk. Driss' brother shows up at the house, in trouble with the wrong crowd; Phillippe, seeing that he and his servant inhabit two inhabit different worlds, dismisses Driss. The two long for each other and are reunited. Etc. Etc. The film, on the level of narrative and affect, doesn't go much deeper than this. The film's humor and tenderness works off the magical absence of racial tensions, off the miraculous fact that Driss and Phillipe can interact with each other "like human beings," rather than as historically conditioned subjects. Let the box office proceeds pour in!
But all this is all genre convention, manifest content. At the edge of the film's compulsory feel-good texture there is another text, a desperate allegory of claustrophobia and failure, a probing of the limits of the neo/post-colonial symbolic. I will go as far to call it a critique. Of course there is the allegory of the crippled ex-colonizer requiring the help, even the spiritual help, of his ex-colonial subjects in order to keep living (well). But this produces a crisis when Driss' brother shows up. The crisis corresponds with the film's discourse on art (in France, even blockbusters seem to need a compulsory meditation on Aesthetics and High Culture). Looking at a nude painting on the mantle, Phillipe asks Driss to imagine what would happen if the woman in the painting stood up and showed her true face. We take this to mean that Driss has now shown his true face, and this is is reason for his dismissal, but on compassionate, humanitarian grounds ("you don't want to be pushing around an invalid your whole life..."). Phillipe, in his immobilized position (like the spectator in the movie theater), has contemplated Driss, and now Driss has turned around, ruining his visual pleasure. Yet the reading is reversible. After all, Phillipe has concealed his handicap to his epistolary lover Eleanore by sending a picture of him before his accident; he is the one, it follows, that has hidden his face, and only now shown his true face, the face of the colonizer's privilege. It helps the second reading that soon after this exchange, we are given a shot of Phillipe from the back, looking out the window, almost matching the position of the nude in the painting.
Yet the question of the "true face" seems to be besides the point when it comes to art and the film's discourse on aesthetics. After all, the woman in the painting never turns around, and, accordingly, the cinematic image (the magical humanism that hides racist structures and colonial history), can never enact such theophanies by its own power. We are trapped within the one-dimensional representation. The painting of the nude is complicated by encounters with modern art earlier in the film. Driss cautions Phillipe against buying an abstract painting (below) for 41,500 Euros. "It's just red splotches." Driss stages the common refutation of non-representational art as skill-less (I could do this myself), which poses a problem for filmic representation too.
The shot shows only Phillipe's head "contemplating" not only the painting but also Driss, who, wearing a leather jacket, eating a bag of M&Ms and shit-talking modern art, enters the frame of the artwork, quite literally upsetting its "whiteness," and adding to it an ideological "depth." Driss is inspired by this travesty of art to begin painting, and Phillipe is able to get Driss' splotches of paint on white canvas sold at 11,000 Euros. This is certainly a commentary on the foibles of the contemporary art market (a rather uninspiring one at that), but far more interesting is how the two instances of non-representational art intersect with the nude, the film's one instance of art that approximates classical conventions. In the juxtaposition of painting as flat surface and painting as representational medium, the filmic image is split into two radically different, and equally racialized, modes of reception (while the political still remains obscured). Is the film a two-dimensional box-office imposture or does it have a true face?
The discourse on art prefigures the film's narrative difficulties, the fracture lines in its ideological closure. There are too many things in this film that don't add up. When Driss and Phillipe get into the private jet, Driss says "are we the only ones here? We're the only ones!" This moment of homosocial intimacy, however, contains the stewardess in the background, busy at work; her presence both sutures and fractures the homosocial bonding--she doesn't count as being on the plane, but her position is metonymy for Driss' own non-belonging. After Driss is "let go," he gets a job by spouting the cultural literacy he learned in Phillipe's service (yes, that's right. If only the colonial elites had been so responsible!), but is called back by the maid when things aren't going well with Phillipe's mental health. Here is where the contents of the optical unconscious come flooding out. A question that the film has elided until now, that of how to envision the relationship between the postcolonial subject and the colonizer outside the master/slave pair, is now brought to fore. The film wants to be optimistic, though it can't but show us its true face. In a repetition of the opening sequence, Driss outsmarts the cops who want to pull him over for speeding by pretending he's taking Phillipe to the hospital. Phillipe plays the part. Wish-fulfillment. White man saves black man from being a victim of Cops. Where does Driss take Phillipe? To the Ocean--the blue sea with waves that are the archetype of the Sublime, the vehicle of colonial expansion, but also, with the twentieth century, the site of an irreducible limit, of a landlocked continental Europe. The woman to whom Phillipe is writing letters is from Dunkirk, the site of evacuation into the sea, where the Nazis conquered France and the latter capitulated. Here I think of the unforgettable final shot from 400 Blows. After World-War II, people go to the sea because they can't go anywhere else, because they're landlocked into inextricable webs, because their kind is no longer welcome on this earth. The visit to the sea in The Intouchables retains this claustrophobic emphasis, on the impossibility of Phillipe and Driss' friendship.
Driss proceeds to cut Phillipe's long beard into different trims: first a Fu Manchu, second a Kaiser mustache (which Phillipe said was his father's mustache), and finally into a Hitler mustache, to which Phillipe expresses horror. The final cut expresses, under humorous cover, the precise content of European continentality, and racialized for the contemporary moment. After revealing these layers of the continental unconscious, there is no hope for recuperation. The only solution for a happy ending is to repeat the famous formula of John Ford's The Searchers. Driss' final gift to Phillipe is to set him up with Eleanore, his Dunkirk love, in a restaurant with glass walls. Driss leaves the restaurant, waving goodbye to Phillipe from across the glass. He walks away and disappears into the crowd; he can leave his "place" now to the white woman from Dunkirk. Behind the glass, the white heterosexual union tells us that even a crippled colonizer has a future, while the Senegalese man, like John Wayne in The Searchers (a comparison that contains not a little irony), can find no place in the world he has helped create. He gracefully disappears into the Outside, beyond the glass partition. Unlike in The Searchers, there is no door, no convenient device by which to shut out the Algerian-Senegalese-Black from the world that he has made. So the screen goes to black.
