Bypassing opposites

Rating: Null/10 (10 February 2015)

This is funny and touching, about a rich disabled man in his château and his rowdy new caretaker from the projects. But where we'd expect pity and self-pity, we get one man hanging out with another, teasing like he would any friend, sharing a spliff. The real compassion of friendship as antidote. Instead of treating an incapacity, nurturing a capacity. Not just dutifully picking up and massaging a broken body that can't be made whole again, but doing these for a mind that can.
The film is rife with pairs of dual opposites - rich and poor, cultured and not, genuine and not, mind and body, etiquette and humor, duty and bond, thinking and doing. Simple, stacking opposites so that the modern mind stuck behind a facade of disappointing conventions from how to treat a patient to courting love will be freed by messy, spontaneous action. It recasts Zorba where the overthinking intellectual learns a deeper wisdom from his employee's unfettered love for life.
No less wistful in the end about redemption than a lachrymose Oscar film on the subject, neat as inspirational films go, whole - but this is deeper about a response to suffering and view that looks past it rather than just shedding beautiful tears before a deadend wall, I always welcome the former.
And how's this for a French postcolonial view? The white and black French in stereotyped symbiosis of mutual dependence, the first as a gentle intellect perched ontop of a dessicated body, surrounded with artifice and etiquette that fail to sooth, the latter injecting him with goofy new vigor for life. But of course to be stuck behind this intellectual cynicism that sees master and servant, to dismiss the film on grounds such as these, would be only more of that ailing Western mind in desperate need to be invigorated with a film just like this.