Rethinking Intouchables: Race and performance in contemporary France

Abstract

The 2011 French blockbuster film Intouchables is based on a true story and depicts the friendship between Parisian Philippe, a white millionaire who is quadriplegic, and his carer Driss, a black man from the city’s banlieues. Whereas the film’s American reception focused on race and criticised the stereotypes imposed on the performing black body, French critics focused on class, and discussed the film’s easy depiction of economic domination. This article approaches this critical disparity through the lens of performance, and argues that the film’s contrasting receptions demonstrate the distinct legacies of American slavery and French colonialism in understanding contemporary iconographies of black performance. A further focus on the film’s source material, as well as the filmmakers’ adaptation of an Algerian character into a Senegalese one, reveals the continued role that the legacy of French colonialism plays in aesthetic representations of race and gender in contemporary France.