After waiting for what seems like a double eternity, I finally attained nirvana a few days back.

The much acclaimed French film The Intouchables (2011) has at long last landed at Netflix (DVD but not streaming), RedBox ($1.22 for DVD) and Amazon ($3.99 for streaming).

Deserving of all the accolades and awards bestowed on it, Intouchables is a touching drama that accomplishes the extraordinary feat of drawing humor and joie de vivre out of the depths of a despairing paragliding accident.

Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano directed Intouchables based on the screenplay they penned together.

A Celebration

In these dreadful times for the movies, with Hollywood increasingly going the way of Bollywood and Kollywood in churning out unwatchable garbage, it’s nice to see the French still have their film-making wits intact.

Intouchables follows in the tradition of the 2012 Oscar winner The Artist in putting out a remarkably offbeat story on celluloid.

No resort to super heroes, computer graphics or any other gimmickry to hold viewers’ attention.

To keep the audience engrossed, Intouchables does it the old-fashioned way via an engaging story coupled with powerful performances.

Meeting of Antipodes

Based on a true story, with surely many cinematic liberties taken in the making of the film, Intouchables is the celluloid tale of a meeting of two completely different personalities – a quadriplegic billionaire and a penniless Black immigrant lately out of prison.

When the wealthy handicapped man Phillipe hires the dirt poor, short-on-compassion Driss as his live-in caretaker, there’s the recipe for an unusual story in the meeting of antipodes.

François Cluzet is brilliant as the calm quadriplegic Philippe.

Cluzet’s talent was hardly a revelation to us since we had seen him previously in the award-winning Tell No One (2007) and Paris.

As for Omar Sy’s performance as Phillipe’s caretaker Driss, let’s just say that you’ll be swept away by the extraordinary passion and the great emotion he brings to his role.

Together, they light up the screen like few movies do these days.

Our research tells us that Intouchables is the most watched French film ever. No surprise.

Say what you will but both French film-makers and moviegoers represent few of the last surviving bastions of class in an increasingly crass world.

I wouldn’t dare recommend Intouchables to the Indian chutiyas.

After all, a nation that has its collective lips locked around Salman Khan’s schlong and their tongues up some worthless Bollywood starlet’s twat is unlikely to appreciate class even if it bitch slaps them on the face in the form of a brilliant French film.