The Gilded Cage

Ruben Alves's The Gilded Cage (La Cage dorée / A Gaiola Dourada) opened in 2013 and was nominated for the César for Best First Feature. The film became one of the most commercially successful French-language comedies of its year (over 1.2 million admissions in France alone) and consolidated Alves, a French director of Portuguese parentage, as the most internationally consequential filmmaker of contemporary France's substantial Luso-French immigrant community.

Maria (Rita Blanco) and José Ribeiro (Joaquim de Almeida) have spent thirty years as Portuguese immigrants in Paris, Maria as the concierge of a bourgeois Boulevard Saint-Germain apartment building, José as the indispensable foreman of his boss Francis Caillaux's construction firm. A surprise inheritance from a deceased Portuguese family member arrives, conditional on returning to live in Portugal. The film follows the broad-comic attempts of the Ribeiros' French employers, friends and neighbours (who have come to depend on the family's labour without quite acknowledging it) to prevent them from leaving.

The film operates simultaneously as broad-comic ensemble piece, character study of the Portuguese-French immigrant identity, and quiet meditation on the moral relationship between immigrant labour and bourgeois French dependence. Roland Giraud and Chantal Lauby play the bourgeois employer-couple. The film became part of the broader continuing French cultural conversation about the country's largely-invisible Portuguese-immigrant community and the place of that community in contemporary French identity.