I love Le Bureau des Légendes (The Bureau). It is almost certainly the best French-language TV show I’ve ever seen and that includes all of Engrenages (Spiral). Good news! Season 3 is just starting on Canal+ in France, which means that fingers crossed, it’ll be on Amazon in the UK within the next few months.
However, in its native land, it has to be said, the ad campaign to promote it isn’t exactly going all out to sell its virtues. True, it’s not the most action-packed of shows, despite being a spy drama, although it does have its moments. But all the same, Canal+ is very much preaching to the converted with its latest campaign…
To be fair, they do have one cool one. Spoilers ahoy, obviously…
A couple of intriguing events for TV lovers have popped up on my radar recently.
Long-time readers will remember that for five years, the Institut Français organised an annual French/UK TV festival called ‘Totally Serialized‘. Some of you might even have won tickets to it on this ‘ere blog. However, there wasn’t one this year, since Totally Serialized is going to become a series of ongoing events throughout the year.
The first of these is a showing on 26 April at 6.30pm at Ciné Lumière in London of France 2’s Le Repenti(Reborn), which is being made available on Walter Presents (US readers can get it through Amazon). It stars Engrenages (Spiral)’s Bruno Debrandt as Alexis, who six years after he was left for dead, burned and wounded by his best friend Victor whom he betrayed, returns to Le Havre to work undercover at Victor’s docks. After significant reconstructive surgery and a changed identity, he is unrecognizable but struggles to stay away from his ex-family.
As you do.
Debrandt will be there on stage in conversation with Walter himself, preceding the showing of episode one. It’s worth noting that it’s actually a two-part telemovie, originally broadcast in 2010, so you’ll only be getting half the story and given that episode one is 90 minutes long and the event’s supposed to finish at 8.15pm, that sounds like about 15 minutes of chat.
Elsewhere, for fans of old UK TV, on 22 April at 7pm at the Museum of Comedy, also in London, Annette Andre will be reminiscing about her career, particularly Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), but also A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum and The Benny Hill Show. There’ll also be a chance to meet her afterwards. Tickets are £17 each.
I’ve been a bit occupied with a broken phone today – grrr, argh – so WHYBW is going to have to wait for another time. But I’ve not forgotten you. Today – hat-tip to Thierry Attard – we have a trailer or two for season 2 of Les Témoins (Witnesses). Despite its being one of the very few French shows to make it to network TV in the UK, I missed the first season because it started airing just before my August holidays. So I can’t tell you what that was about, although the suggestions from Wikipedia are that it was quite conventional.
Witnesses is set in the small coastal town of Le Tréport in northern France, where the bodies of murder victims are being unearthed and left for discovery. The former chief-of-police, Paul Maisonneuve (Thierry Lhermitte), is implicated in the murders. Detectives Justin (Jan Hammenecker) and Sandra (Marie Dompnier) investigate the case
Sounds very vanilla.
However, season 2 looks a bit different. Marie Dompnier returns but one of my favourite actresses – Audrey Fleurot of Engrenages (Spiral) fame – is this season’s guest star and here are the trailers I promised you.
https://player.vimeo.com/video/204386413
https://player.vimeo.com/video/204386412
If your French is a bit duff, that’s “15 men found dead, frozen on a bus. All loved the same woman.” And here’s a write-up which I genuinely did translate myself this time:
A country road along the North Sea, the first day in Spring. 15 dead men, frozen, found sitting quietly in a bus.
Catherine Keemer: a mysterious woman, an amnesiac, discovered the next day in her car, 100km away. The 15 victims in the bus: all the men shared her love, for one night or a year. Sandra Winckler, a determined and obsessed cop who won’t tolerate an unsolved mystery. Sandra Winckler (Marie Dompnier) and Catherine Keemer (Audrey Fleurot): two woman who are going to need to unite for the better and against the worst.
Now that’s a bit more interesting. The show’s back on France 2 in March but no word yet if either Netflix or Channel 4/Walter Presents is going to pick it up. You’d hope, wouldn’t you?
PS No, I don’t know why the names are above the wrong people in the poster (the tag line: “Love is the biggest danger”)
Canal+ is my favourite (and the best by a country mile) of all the French TV channels and although it’s having a bit of a problem at the moment with subscriber numbers and is cutting back quite severely, it is at least still producing a fair old number of top notch shows. Evidencing that is the channel’s trailer for its upcoming TV schedule, which has something of the Beeb’s “Original Drama” vibe to it.
Most of the shows will be familiar to British viewers or at least visitors to this ‘ere blog, since it features season 6 of Engrenages (Spiral) (BBC Four) and season 3 of Le Bureau Des Légendes (The Bureau) (Amazon), as well as season 2 of Versailles (BBC Two) and season 3 of Kaboul Kitchen (Kabul Kitchen) (Channel 4).
But new to the pack is Guyane (Guyana), an eight-part “modern Western” lavishly filmed in the country of the title and which started a couple of days ago. Here’s a synopsis:
Twenty-year-old Vincent Ogier (Mathieu Spinosi) is a Parisian geology student who has come to Guyana for an internship at a gold mining company: Cayenor.
A thirst for danger and a foolish mistake will push the young engineer to team-up with the “godfather of gold” Antoine Serra (Olivier Rabourdin from Spin and The Last Panthers), who reigns over the lost village of Saint Elias. Vincent believes he has found a mythical gold mine: a mine abandoned for 120 years, named “Sarah Bernhardt”. Serra has the skills to operate it. Seemingly paternal and friendly, Serra embarks with Vincent into the depths of the Guyanese jungle…
In a few weeks, Vincent will pass from trainee to adventurer…
No, I’m not quite sure about the Sarah Bernhardt thing, either. Here’s the trailer and you can have a much longer Guyane trailer, too, you lucky people:
It’s “What have you been watching?”, my chance to tell you what movies and TV I’ve been watching recently and your chance to recommend anything you’ve been watching.
I did promise you on Monday one potential last WHYBW to sign off with before the Christmas hols to mop up the few shows with remaining episodes this week. And here it is! How exciting. How reliable of me for a change.
After the jump then, the finale of Falling Water and as Netflix released all of Travelers today in the UK, I was able to binge-watch the final episodes, so I’ll be looking at them, too. Thanks to its delayed airing, I’ll be looking at the latest (not final) episode of Shooter, and I’ve also watched a few more episodes of The OA since I started it on Monday.
On top of that, I also managed to catch up with another of Netflix’s French imports:
Dix pour cent (Call My Agent!) (France: France 2; UK: Netflix) Sort of the French equivalent of Extras, Dix pour cent is set in a talent agency, where the various members of staff have to deal with all the problems that beset the ‘talent’, including the talent themselves. Except there’s all manner of inter-agency rivalry, poaching et al to deal with, too, once the head of the agency pops his clogs.
The show’s selling point in France is that series producer Dominique Besnehard was one of the biggest talent agents in France for 20 years and managed huge numbers of top actors, actresses and directors. He then persuaded a select range of these stars to appear as ‘themselves’ in the show to send themselves up, with episode one seeing Cécile de France (The Young Pope, Around The World in 80 Days, Mesrine) finding herself ditched from a Quentin Tarantino movie for being – gasp! – too old.
Which is a problem for UK audiences, since although there’s a chance that some of us will be familiar with some of the stars such as Audrey Fleurot from Engrenages (Spiral), most of the stars are like de France and are going to leave virtually everyone scratching our heads in exactly the same way every American did when Les Dennis turned up in Extras, for example. Even if you do know the show features such cameos (which isn’t obvious), most people aren’t going to know fictional character from cameo, let alone know an actor’s public persona and what they’re sending up.
On top of that, it’s just not that funny. Quelle surprise, given it’s France 2, but the show’s few jokes went flashing past unaccompanied by laughs. Oh, and the subtitling is terrible.
One to avoid unless you really know your French acting scene, I’m afraid.
