Éric Toledano makes sociable comedies with Olivier Nakache, bringing people across class divides into one another's company. We like their warmth and their faith in actors, but their eagerness to reconcile everyone can make difficult lives look too easily repaired.
Fi1m perspective
In The Intouchables (2011), Omar Sy's Driss brings irreverence to his job caring for François Cluzet's Philippe, a wealthy aristocrat with quadriplegia. The writing by Éric Toledano and Olivier Nakache presses the contrast, but the actors make the friendship worth watching. We warmed to the pair because Sy and Cluzet make their enjoyment of each other's company convincing. This is the strongest reason to spend an evening with the film.
Toledano's work is inseparable from Nakache's: they began making shorts together in 1995 and moved into features with Let's Be Friends (2005) and Those Happy Days (2006). The Intouchables brought their international breakthrough. Their recurring interest is in people who have little reason to meet learning to work or live alongside one another. Comedy lets them approach difficult subjects without making every conversation sound like a lesson.
The trouble in The Intouchables is how much that friendship is asked to prove. Driss, an ex-con from the banlieues, too often supplies vitality for a rich man's benefit, while Philippe becomes an opportunity for Driss to demonstrate his worth. Sy works to give Driss more individuality than this arrangement allows. The screenplay leaves too little room for either man to behave in ways that might complicate its reassurance about class and race, and that limits an otherwise enjoyable film.
The later films keep placing social questions inside relationships and groups. Samba (2014) brings an undocumented worker together with an immigration caseworker; The Specials (2019) turns to carers for autistic young people, drawing on real associations. A Difficult Year (2023) approaches consumerism, debt and climate activism through comedy. These choices suggest a continuing belief that an audience will stay with an uncomfortable subject if it has people to care about.
Just an Illusion (2026), a coming-of-age story set in 1980s Paris and drawn from the directors' adolescence, turns towards more personal material. That may give them less need to make each character stand for a social group. We would welcome that freedom after the tidiness of The Intouchables. Start with that film for Sy and Cluzet, and be prepared to question what the screenplay finds so readily reassuring.
Biography
Éric Toledano is a French filmmaker, screenwriter and director. He was born on 3 July 1971 in Paris. He has worked in long-term collaboration with Olivier Nakache on writing and directing feature films since the mid-1990s.
Their credits include Those Happy Days (2006), The Intouchables (2011), Samba (2014), C'est la vie! (2017) and The Specials (2019). Toledano and Nakache also created the television series In Therapy (2021–2022).
