Directed by Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano and released in France in 2011, the film stars François Cluzet as Philippe and Omar Sy as Driss. It is adapted from the real relationship between Philippe Pozzo di Borgo and Abdel Sellou, and it closes on documentary footage of the two men themselves. What follows lays out the plot in order, explains the ending beat by beat, and sets out what the story is arguing about care, class and pity.
Table of Contents
- The plot in order, from the car chase to the job offer
- What drives Philippe, and what drives Driss
- Why Driss leaves
- The ending explained, step by step
- What the film means — and the argument it started
- How closely it follows the real story
- Frequently Asked Questions
The plot in order, from the car chase to the job offer
The film opens in the middle of its own story. Driss drives Philippe through Paris at night in a Maserati, is pulled over by police, and talks his way out of a ticket by claiming his passenger is having a seizure and needs a hospital — the officers provide an escort. The scene is a flash-forward; the film then rewinds to how the two met. Philippe is a wealthy man paralysed from the neck down after a paragliding accident. He is interviewing candidates for a live-in carer.
Driss, who lives in a crowded flat in the banlieue with the aunt who raised him, is not there for the job: he wants a signature proving he attended an interview so he can keep claiming benefits. He is rude, uninterested, and makes a crack about Philippe's condition rather than tiptoeing around it. Philippe tells him to come back the next morning for the paper. Driss returns, is handed a trial period instead, and takes it after being thrown out of the family flat. The middle of the film is the education of both men: Driss learns the mechanics of the body he is responsible for — the catheter, the compression stockings, the lifting, the night-time crises when Philippe's breathing goes wrong. Philippe, in turn, gets a household that treats him as a man rather than an invalid.
What drives Philippe, and what drives Driss
Philippe's grief is the engine under the comedy. His wife Béatrice died; the accident that broke his neck came in the wake of that loss, and he describes the paragliding as a form of recklessness. He is intellectually curious, surrounded by art and music, and immobilised in two senses — he cannot move, and he cannot bring himself to act on anything new. Driss's problem is the opposite: motion with nowhere to go. He has served time, he has no trade, and his younger cousin Adama is drifting toward the same trouble.
He has a quick, unsentimental eye and no reverence for anything, which is why the household works for him and he for it. The film keeps testing both men against the world outside their arrangement. Philippe's circle warns him that hiring someone with Driss's record is dangerous. Driss's answer to an auction-house abstract selling for an enormous sum is to paint one himself, which Philippe then sells to a friend for a four-figure price without telling the buyer who made it. The joke works in two directions: it punctures the art market, and it is the first time anyone pays Driss for something he produced.
Why Driss leaves
Driss does not quit in anger, and Philippe does not fire him over a failure. The separation comes from Philippe's side. Driss's family situation reasserts itself — his cousin's trouble lands at the door and pulls him back toward the estate — and Philippe decides the young man cannot spend his twenties as the hands and legs of a man who will never get up. Philippe says, in effect, that an indefinite arrangement would be good for him and bad for Driss.
He releases him. It is the most selfless act in a film built around a relationship that began as a transaction, and it is also the moment Philippe reverts to the role everyone else gives him: he becomes the man being managed rather than the man deciding. A series of replacement carers follows, played for a bleak kind of comedy. They are competent, careful, and entirely wrong — they handle Philippe like a patient, which is precisely the thing Driss never did. Philippe stops eating properly, stops going out, and lets his beard grow.
The ending explained, step by step
Yvonne, the housekeeper, calls Driss. He comes back, finds Philippe unshaven and withdrawn, and resumes without asking permission. What follows is a compressed replay of everything the friendship was for: The final shot before the credits is Philippe smiling at her.
The film then cuts to footage of the real Philippe Pozzo di Borgo and Abdel Sellou, which tells the audience the friendship did not end at the restaurant door. The structural point of the ending is that Driss's last act as a carer is to make himself unnecessary. He does not restore the job. He manufactures the one situation Philippe's money, staff and intelligence could not produce for him: a woman who is there, in the room, because somebody shoved him into the chair in front of her.
- He shaves Philippe, running through a sequence of absurd moustache and beard shapes first — the same refusal to be solemn that got him the job.
- He takes him out in the fast car, and they are pulled over again, which pays off the opening scene and shows us that the chase we saw was not the beginning of the story but the beginning of its ending.
- He drives him to the coast, dresses him properly, and seats him at a restaurant table by the window.
- He leaves. Through the glass, Philippe watches Éléonore — the woman he has been corresponding with by letter and by phone for months, and whom he has avoided meeting in person — walk in and sit down opposite him.
What the film means — and the argument it started
The thesis of *The Intouchables* is that the opposite of good care is not bad care but pity. Every trained professional in the film treats Philippe gently and thereby confirms his status as an object. Driss arrives with no training, makes jokes about his employer's useless legs, pours hot water on them to prove a point about sensation, and treats him as a peer who happens to need lifting. The film argues this is what dignity actually consists of, and it argues it through contrast rather than speeches. The second theme is mutual rescue rather than rescue in one direction. Philippe gives Driss employment, a room, exposure to music and painting, and a reference.
Driss gives Philippe nerve. Neither transformation is presented as charity, and the title points at this: both men are untouchable in their own way — one by caste, one by a body nobody wants to handle. The film is also the subject of a long-running criticism worth knowing before you recommend it. A strand of English-language commentary at the time of its US release argued that the dynamic — a Black man from the projects energising a frozen white aristocrat — reproduces an old and uncomfortable screen pattern, however warmly it is played. Supporters counter that the broad shape of the relationship is drawn from a real one, and that Driss is written with his own interiority, family and ambition rather than existing solely to improve his employer. Both readings survive a second viewing; the film is more interesting if you hold them at once.
How closely it follows the real story
The film is adapted from Philippe Pozzo di Borgo's account of his own life after his paragliding accident, and from his years with the carer he hired, Abdel Sellou. The documentary footage over the end credits is the film's own acknowledgement of its source. The adaptation makes changes, and the largest is the character of Driss. Abdel Sellou is of North African descent; the screen character is Senegalese, written for and transformed by Omar Sy.
Timelines are compressed, and the romantic resolution at the restaurant is the kind of clean closing beat that films build and lives generally do not. Two markers of the film's reception are useful context. It was an enormous commercial success in France — one of the most-attended French productions ever released there, with admissions in the high tens of millions of euros of business and well over nineteen million tickets by the usual French count — and Omar Sy won the César for Best Actor, a first for a Black performer in that category. An English-language remake, *The Upside*, with Bryan Cranston and Kevin Hart, followed later and is a separate film; if someone recommends "the Kevin Hart one," they are not describing this.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Driss get his job back at the end?
No. He returns to pull Philippe out of his decline and arrange the meeting with Éléonore, then leaves. The end-credit footage of the real men implies the friendship continued, but the film deliberately does not restore the employment arrangement.
Who is the woman at the restaurant?
Éléonore, Philippe's pen pal. They had exchanged letters and phone calls for months while Philippe avoided meeting her in person, partly because he had not told her about his condition.
Why does the film open with the car chase?
It is a flash-forward to the drive during Driss's return near the end. Opening there sets the tone — comedy, speed, and two men conspiring — before the film doubles back to the job interview.
Is The Intouchables based on a true story?
Yes. It is adapted from the relationship between Philippe Pozzo di Borgo, who was paralysed in a paragliding accident, and his carer Abdel Sellou. Both appear in footage shown over the closing credits.
Is it the same film as The Upside?
No. *The Upside*, starring Bryan Cranston and Kevin Hart, is an English-language remake of this French original.