The “Intouchables,” based on a true story, is an ingratiating French comedy of cross-racial friendship about two men — one rich, uptight and white; the other poor, exuberant and black — who become best pals in spite of their differences. Aristocrat, Philippe is paralyzed from the neck down as the result of a hang-gliding accident and lives attended by a nervous staff and ignored by his adolescent daughter. His newest employee, a streetwise hoodlum named Driss, does not look as though he will last long in the job. Moving into Philippe’s mansion, Driss steps away from a background of poverty, family dysfunction and trouble with the police. Under his boss’s stern gaze and imperious tutelage he starts to acquire a work ethic and a sense of discipline. In exchange, he helps Philippe discover his appetite for life and his capacity for joy.

Driss does this by flirting shamelessly with the boss’s secretary and giving Philippe’s daughter the stern talking-to she needs. He introduces Philippe to marijuana, encourages him to date and listen to less suffy music.

The caricatures are astonishingly brazen, as ancient comic archetypes — a pompous master and a clowning servant right out of Molière — are updated with vague social relevance, an overlay of Hollywood-style sentimentality and a conception of race that might kindly be called cartoonish.

In the post-civil-rights, post-blaxploitation era, entertainments based on the clash of white squareness and black soul had a certain novelty and charm.

As France has grappled with immigration and its rapidly evolving identity as a multicultural society, much of the best recent French film and literature grapples earnestly with this new situation.

Race, in France as in the United States, is a perpetual source of confusion and discomfort; to address it is always, in some way, to get it wrong. “The Intouchables” sets out to convert that anxiety into easy laughter and  to replace antagonism and incomprehension with comfort and consensus.

Directed by  Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano. Cast: François Cluzet, Omar Sy. Rated: R.