Transnational blackface, neo-minstrelsy and the ‘French Eddie Murphy’ in Intouchables

Abstract

The 2011 French film Intouchables is an interracial buddy film about a black caregiver from the suburbs and a quadriplegic white aristocrat. Éric Tolédano and Olivier Nakache’s film broke box office records in France and abroad, becoming the second highest grossing French film of all time in domestic release and the most successful non-English film on the export market. However, the film’s critical reception was mixed; some celebrated the film’s social conscience while others denounced its racism. In this article, the author analyses the film’s treatment of race, specifically the ways in which Tolédano and Nakache draw on tropes of American blackface, neo-minstrelsy and 1980s Hollywood interracial buddy comedies starring Eddie Murphy to visualise racial inequality and discrimination in contemporary France. The author tracks the ways in which these American tropes align and do not align with representations of cultural diversity and the banlieues in France, and he ultimately argues that the film’s financial success and ambivalent reception track with the contradictory politics of American tropes for representing blackness.