Plan B Forum

The Intouchables



A rich quadriplegic, living in a mansion in Paris, requires a live-in carer. A young offender turns up for an interview, but he is not really looking to get the job. However, to his surprise, he is hired. The two men then develop a close friendship.

Upon the film's 21 September 2012 UK release under the title Untouchable, The Independent called it a "a third-rate buddy movie that hardly understands its own condescension....Why has the world flipped for this movie? Maybe it's the fantasy it spins on racial/social/cultural mores, much as Driving Miss Daisy did 20-odd years ago – uptight rich white employer learns to love through black employee's life-force. That was set in the segregationist America of the 1940s. What's this film's excuse?"

Robbie Collin of The Telegraph called it "as broad, accessible and trombonishly unsubtle as a subtitled Driving Miss Daisy"; according to Collin, the "characters are conduits for charisma rather than great dramatic roles, but the horseplay between Sy and Cluzet is often very funny, and one joke bounces merrily into the next."

Nigel Farndale, also of The Telegraph, said: "The film, which is about to be released in Britain, has been breaking box-office records in France and Germany, and one of the reasons seems to be that it gives the audience permission to laugh with, not at, disabled people, and see their lives as they have never seen them before."

“Nothing stopped this guy. I knew he wouldn’t flinch and could take the initiative.” He had interviewed about 90 people and knew as soon as he met Abdel that: “This is the guy I need. I don’t give a damn that he is out of jail. I needed him. And he became a friend afterwards.” As well as sharing a sense of humour, they were both on the margins of society – a disabled man and a criminal. That, he thinks, explains why they came to depend on each other, enrich each other’s lives and bridge the race and class divide.

Philippe, who speaks fluent English, is profound on the subject of pity.

“He treated me like I neededed to be treated in the tough times ahead, partly because of my condition but also because my wife was dying of cancer [she died three years after his accident]. I needed to be back on track. Pity is the last thing you need. Pity is hopeless. Pity is what someone gives you because he is afraid to take care of you. I didn’t need that. But compassion I don’t need also. It comes from Latin and means ‘suffering with’. I don’t want you to be suffering with me. I need consolation, which in Latin means keeping me as a whole person, respecting me as I am.”

Is there a scene you envision before you even start a film and what was it for The Intouchables?

Olivier: The first scene, the car chase.

Eric: We wrote the first scene before the script, before everything. The cops stop them, do we know that Philippe's disability is true, have they stolen something, are they drug dealers? We still don't know who they are...

Olivier: And the Opera scene too. And at the gallery, "no handy, no candy."

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