The Intouchables · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A Maserati is going too fast through Paris at night, and there are police behind it. Driss is driving and enjoying himself. Beside him, belted upright, sits a man who cannot move anything below his neck. When they get boxed in, the two of them improvise a medical emergency, and there is only one body in that car that could plausibly be having one. Philippe's face does the work. The police escort them to the hospital. The opening gag is also the film's design: this man's body has been taken out of the action, so everything action used to do has to happen somewhere else.

Deleuze is not the first name you reach for with a comedy that sold roughly nineteen million tickets in France, but he supplies the one piece of vocabulary that makes the film's structure visible rather than merely likeable. He takes from Bergson the idea that a living body is a centre of indetermination: a gap held open between a movement coming in and a movement going out. Something is perceived, something registers as feeling, something is done. Cinema's classical form runs on bodies that close that gap on cue. A character sees a situation, is moved by it, acts, and the situation changes. Deleuze called that whole regime the movement-image, and the useful thing about the term is that it names an anatomy, not a style.

Philippe's gap never closes. Perception arrives intact; he has taste, hearing, a fast and slightly cruel wit. Nothing goes out. He is an interval with no exit.

Deleuze wrote a whole second book about what cinema found when it started making films about people like this. In post-war European cinema, characters got stranded in front of what they saw, unable to convert it into action, and time began to appear on screen in its own right instead of as the measure of somebody's movement. The agent becomes a seer. You would expect a film about a quadriplegic aristocrat to go straight there. Nakache and Toledano (it should be both names, since they write and direct as a unit) decline, and the refusal is the invention. They give Philippe a second body.

The film distributes one sensory-motor circuit across two men. Driss carries the action: the driving, the dancing, the puncturing of bourgeois solemnity in front of an expensive abstract canvas, all of Omar Sy's enormous kinetic charm. Philippe carries perception and affect. That is why the film can drop obstacle-driven plotting and still hold. Its episodes are an accretion: the job interview, the first bath, the night drive, the birthday recital, the paraglider, the correspondence with a woman that Driss engineers on Philippe's behalf. None of them builds toward a decisive act that transforms a global situation. Each is a small gesture that discloses a world, which is Deleuze's small form of the action-image, where the act comes first and the situation is what you infer from it. The friendship isn't a theme laid over the architecture. It is the architecture.

Which puts an unusual load on François Cluzet's face. Deleuze splits the film face in two. There is the reflecting face, held still, expressing one pure quality such as wonder or contempt, and there is the intensive face, where micro-movements build across the features toward something about to break. Most performances get to choose. Cluzet has to do both at once and has nothing else, since Philippe's entire instrument is a face and a voice. The hauteur is reflective. The grief and the longing are intensive, working in the jaw and around the eyes because they cannot get anywhere else. Watch the birthday scene knowing this and it tilts: the joke is Earth, Wind & Fire hijacking a chamber recital, but the shot that matters is the still face receiving it.

Then there is what the film does with movement itself. Deleuze noticed that in musicals the dancer sometimes stops being the source of motion and the world takes it over. The character holds; everything around them moves. That is Philippe's condition converted from deficit into pleasure. The Maserati sequence gives him Paris streaming past a body that cannot lean into a turn. The paraglider gives him the sky, which is also the thing that broke him. Ludovico Einaudi's circling piano figures and the soul records make the same trade in sound: one idiom stays put and repeats, the other dances, and the film's happiness is the moment they start sharing a scene. The trips zig-zag between spaces that have no business touching: the gilded hôtel particulier, the hard light of the housing blocks, a car, the air. It is a single line drawn across a social map that French cinema usually keeps in separate films.

The bodies also make an argument they never state. Driss lifting, washing, carrying, positioning; Philippe permitting it. Deleuze uses gest for a posture that exposes a social relation without anyone naming it, and the caregiving scenes are exactly that. The first bath holds embarrassment, employment, and intimacy in one arrangement of two bodies.

That arrangement has a long screen history, and the film knows it. The forced Black-white pairing whose antagonism turns into intimacy comes from The Defiant Ones. The class-mismatched male pair drifting through a city, half hustle and half wound, is the shape of Midnight Cowboy, and the tonal recipe of a privileged man restored by an unrespectable friend belongs to The Fisher King. Rain Man codified the caregiving odd-couple picture that mines comedy and dignity from the same pairing. Driving Miss Daisy supplied the memoir-sourced chamber two-hander built on warm, unhurried two-shots across a service relation, which is close to what Mathieu Vadepied's clean coverage does here. My Left Foot proved that acting confined to a near-immobile body could carry a film. Nakache and Toledano inherit all of it and add the split circuit.

The asymmetry is worth saying plainly. Perception, memory, interiority, and the interval all belong to Philippe. Driss gets to be the action. The film grew from a documentary about the two real men and from a memoir, and the memoir was the aristocrat's. The structure of the film reproduces the structure of its sources, which is a large part of why the criticism about race and borrowed vitality landed as hard as it did. Deleuze's vocabulary doesn't excuse that. It sharpens it, because you can point at which functions of the circuit went to which man.

What it did commercially is easier to measure: roughly nineteen million French admissions and over $400 million worldwide, give or take the conversions, which made a French popular comedy travel the way French cinema almost never does and turned the globally remake-able feel-good property into a business model. Its real trick is smaller and stranger than that. It looked at a man who has been removed from the action-image and, instead of making him a seer, built him a friend to act with.

Watch it again for the stillness rather than the jokes. Then ask who is allowed to be the interval, and who has to keep moving.