The Untouchable (L'Intouchable) Benoit Jacquot (2006)

It is always interesting seeing India through the eyes of the West. The India I see is transparent, familiar and easy to navigate. The crowds, the bazaars, the poverty, social hierarchies seem natural and go unnoticed by my conscious eye. To Western eyes, however, as is obvious in Benoit Jacquot new film The Untouchable (L’intouchable), India is a mysterious, crowded, and hard to fathom place. His India is across a border that the Western visitor cannot hope to cross. His India is, in a sense, untouchable.

Like many great French cinema directors, Jacquot is the master of understatement. Nothing much happens in the film. Jeanne (Isild Le Besco), a penniless young actress drifting through life discovers that her father might have been Indian. Her mother is not totally sure, but who else could it have been. Obviously confused about this new Indian side to her, she impulsively decides to visit India. Since she doesn’t have the money, she signs up to act in a simulated sex scene to pay her way (the emotional distance with which Isild Le Besco plays this scene is worth the price of admission alone).

When Jeanne arrives in Delhi, the picture changes. From the muted colors, empty streets, and soft sounds of France, the film is suddenly full of the sound, people, and vibrant colors of India. In the India part, Jacquot lets the camera do the talking and one can see the wonder that is his India - populated, anarchic, and overwhelming. Jeanne immerses herself in India and the camera does the same. In one sequence, the camera stays still while a seething mass of humanity rushes by on rickshaws, motorcycles, cars; each vehicle competing for the limited space available on the road. She buys a 3AC ticket to Varanasi but ends up traveling in unreserved second class, perhaps to experience the India she thinks that Indians do (or perhaps the director was careless!).

In Benaras, she meets the son of the Dom she thinks is her father (no, not a gratuitous coincidence, she asks around for the Dom by name) and is invited to his sisters wedding. At the wedding, she discovers that her father, if he is indeed her father, is not the Dom but rather is the Dom’s brother Arnab, a school teacher in Delhi. She returns to Delhi where she follows Arnab from the school but then returns to France without meeting him. He, in a sense, remains the last untouchable.

While the India/France contrast works well in the film, Jacquot, unfortunately, overplays the untouchable angle. On the flight to Delhi, Jeanne is seated next to a mysterious Indian, an untouchable himself, who mysteriously disappears mid-flight through the machinations of the Flight Attendants. This episode, designed presumably to lecture the audience about untouchables, is seeped in the mysterious ways of the Orient of books like The Moonstone. These mid-nineteenth century ideas have no place in a modern film.

In another episode, a gay French man takes Jeanne along to visit his cousin, a sister of St. Theresa at a convent near Varanasi. In the conversation that follows, the gay man and his cousin seem to be on different planets and one can only assume that Jacquot is trying to imply that all human relationships are untouchable.

In summary, the film is worth seeing just to see the familiar sights of India through the eyes of an outsider. But, as cinema, the film was a little disappointing with a simplistic message and a storyline that is, um, untouchable.