


The Intouchables was voted "cultural event of the year" in France after becoming one of the biggest box-office hits in the country's history, which just goes to show they don't have a hell of a lot to feel snooty about these days. If this thing were in English with American stars, we'd know its kind a mile off—a feel-good, based-on-a-true-story crowd-pleaser that mixes punchlines and uplift in equal measure.

A U.S. remake is as inevitable as an oil spill, but your best reason to see the original is that the remake won't have Omar Sy. Magnetic and self-assured, this dynamite actor can almost make us forget we're watching the hothouse Parisian version of a cliché we're wearily familiar with on this side of the Atlantic: an exuberant, rascally but wise Nègre magique—that's "magic Negro" to us, folks—who's been put on this earth for no other purpose except to improve white people's lives.

He plays Driss, a Franco-Senegalese petty hood from the wrong side of the Metro tracks who unexpectedly turns up among the applicants for a job as a wealthy quadriplegic's new caregiver. Driss has no interest in being hired; he just wants a chit signed confirming he tried so that he can go on collecting unemployment. To his surprise, though, paralyzed but elegant Philippe (Francois Cluzet, who's also very good) is intrigued enough to give him a tryout, probably from sheer boredom. Moving into his lavish new digs in his employer's mansion, Driss scandalizes the other servants with his earthy exuberance, candid sexual come-ons to Philippe's assistant Magalie (Audrey Fleurot), and disrespect for the responsibilities of a gig that's just another way of playing the angles to him.

Will Driss discover he's better than that? Just as surely as aristocratic Philippe will be restored to enjoying life despite his handicap and desolation at the loss of his wife some years before. Once the two men bond, it's one oil-and-water routine after another: Philippe introducing Driss to opera and modern art, Driss becoming Philippe's enabler in daredevil antics and even romance. All this can be made to parse all too easily as one heckuva cutesy metaphor for old, white, paralytic France and its nonwhite population learning to benefit from each other's influence. It's so pleased with its own benignly retro, "I'll bring the civilized values if you bring the chuckling zest for life" stereotyping that it makes The Help look like The Battle of Algiers.

The filmmakers—Olivier Nakache and Eric Tolenado, who co-directed as well as co-wrote—are almost maddeningly good at manipulating the material for maximum entertainment value while keeping real-world messiness and pain at bay. (The scenes involving Driss's mean-streets life before Philippe and his later attempts to do the right thing for a kid brother headed down the same path are tossed in because they're part of the fairy tale, not a harsh contrast to it.) They've also got a habit of introducing plot elements that get dropped as soon as they've served their purpose as comic vignettes; at one point, amused by the high prices Philippe pays for abstract paintings that just look like squiggles to him, Driss tries his hand at one and it sells too. We don't learn whether he ever picks up a paintbrush again, whether for laughs or in earnest.

So we're lucky—or, depending on how much happier we'd be resisting the story's treacly pull, unlucky—that Cluzet and Sy are so entertaining together. The latter even pulls off the movie's corniest Zorba the Black Guy bit, a prissy birthday party for Philippe at which Driss, having put up with the live chamber orchestra's classical music, decides to show off his dance moves to his kind of party noise: Earth, Wind & Fire. And yes, he gets those sedate Paris ladies shaking their Chanel-clad booties, too—but Sy is so terrifically lithe and charismatic as he cuts loose that the scene is a star-making moment, not the embarrassment it deserves to be. Whatever your reservations may be otherwise, you'll come out praying the dude's made enough dough from Intouchables to afford to take some time off learning English.

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