Run time: 112 mins

(Subtitled)

Language: French

What more to be said of this fabulous heartwarming gallic spark? A huge true-story hit around the world, no moreso than at here the Rex where it has/will run and run.

The film chronicles the unlikely burgeoning friendship between Philippe (Cluzet) a wealthy and cultured quadriplegic, and Driss (Omar Sy) a young banlieue (slum) dwelling French West African hired to be his reluctant carer.  This routine ‘odd-couple’ story works on some other level, simultaneously wry, tender and hard-hitting. Perhaps inevitably, Philippe and Driss find their cosmic differences reveal more about… Philippe’s reluctant romantic involvement with a pen-friend; Driss with his flirtatious, mischievous ways and his deep rooted immigrant poverty and consequent daily family earthquakes.  “Untouchable’s moral is conservative optimism: give a man responsibility and he will act responsibly? Might charm, but wont change the world…” (Oh yeah? Telegraph) It will move yours.

From its opening ambiguity, it draws you in, teasing an uncertain tension, before you fall in love. Only the French seem to understand how to tell a fundamental human tale to touch us all across barriers of language and… borders. At the closing of a bad year, come: be uplifted by a European Country’s effortless art of screen story telling; perhaps France’s greatest export gift…