Rolling to You (2018)

Rolling to You arrives from France in 2018, directed by and starring Franck Dubosc, and concerns a wealthy businessman named Jocelyn who pretends to use a wheelchair in order to charm women. This is the premise. The film treats it as farce. We are asked to find comedy in a man performing a disability he does not have, which places the entire enterprise at some distance from the contemporary vocabulary of sensitivity that has grown up around such subjects. The French title means everyone standing, a pun the English distributor declined to carry over.

The picture is a romantic comedy of the old school, which is to say it is preoccupied with seduction, misunderstanding, and the eventual softening of a cad. Jocelyn is a misogynist by design, and the film never seriously interrogates that. It expects him to be redeemed by love. The wheelchair-bound sister, Florence, is played by Alexandra Lamy, an actress who does not use a wheelchair. The cast is uniformly white. No environmental anxieties intrude. No critique of the protagonist's wealth is offered, though he has plenty of it. Disability functions here as a plot device and a punchline, not as a subject of advocacy.

There is nothing in the film that gestures toward the social preoccupations of the current decade. It is a lightweight French boulevard comedy with a questionable central conceit, performed with energy and shot without distinction. We have seen this shape of film many times, and we will see it again. It asks nothing of the audience beyond a willingness to laugh at a man in a borrowed wheelchair, and it offers nothing in return but ninety minutes of Gallic charm. We record it, we file it, we move on.