Lupin (Netflix)
Call My Agent! (Netflix)
All the Sins (Channel 4) | All 4
The Trump Show (BBC Two) | iPlayer
It’s been a week of subtitles, a few other lands having the jumped-up temerity to communicate in languages other than the Queen’s English, and one of the chief offenders is the land of Netflix. I raise a post-Burns glass to it, and to the likes of Channel 4’s Walter Presents, for offering other landscapes, sounds, lives: the ability to travel, during lockdown, for the tiniest of fees.
Lupin has been an ultra-hit around much of the world: a strange phenomenon when you consider it was the creation of an all but forgotten French author, and the hero, Arsène Lupin, is a “gentleman burglar” complete with monocle and top hat. But translate it to modern-day Paris, with the charismatic Omar Sy, a sexy Stetson flat cap and some hacking extraordinaire, and it becomes utterly understandable that Marseille schoolkids are shunning smartphones for under-the-desk reading of actual Lupin books; that in Quebec, urgent reprints of Maurice Leblanc’s 1905 series are approaching the squillion. So there is a demand, still, for a rollicking good story, well told, with identifiable goodies and baddies, and magically impossible twists: who’d in these days have guessed it, apart from Ms Rowling?
It helps hugely that Lupin is rather good: stylish, nuanced, hangs together as a cohesive whole, and secondary characters, such as the dodgy ageing flic with half a conscience and the faded journo with a lovely dog named J’Accuse, are incredibly well rounded. But it’s Omar Sy, as French-Senegalese con artist Assane Diop, an avid fan since childhood of the Arsène oeuvre, who carries the whole thing, every scene, on powerful shoulders. This first half-series ends on a cliffhanger and already folk are clamouring: Netflix is “on it”, so expect the second season to be fast-tracked.
A brief warning: Netflix often offers a settings choice of dubbing or subtitles. If you go for the dubbing option, not only will you be denied the ineffable accented French language but also a) you will self-define as un moron, and b) have to watch people saying things in strange unaccented AmerEnglish, which bear literally no relation to what the actor’s on-screen mouth is shaping.
Better still – and also ridiculously, shamelessly French – is the new (fourth) series of Call My Agent!. A small team of high-powered actors’ agents have to cater to their charges’ every whim, which involves obeisance, lying, flirting, backstabbing and, of course, getting tiddly in impossibly glamorous Parisian bars.
Part of the undoubted charm is seeing famous actors – famous French actors, admittedly – playing spoilt, indulged, vicious or weeping versions of themselves. Mimie Mathy, Jean Reno, Charlotte Gainsbourg – although Sigourney Weaver also has a memorable episode. Part of the charm, too, is the quiet pokes it takes at that generic group, actors, with their dreadful, cloying needs for “challenge” or “reinvention” or “relevance”, when all we’re doing is inviting them to get paid for saying words. The final part of the charm is the lying agents: Gabriel, caught between an actor who wants to be a standup, and an ageing comic who wants to be a straight movie star, gets himself hideously entangled in questions over whether women have to choose between being funny or pretty. It ends badly.
Main charm, though, is the friendship coursing through that small team, now led by the fabulous Camille Cottin (Andréa). An actor bravely unafraid to portray the most clenched person in the room: and as such she lends wings and storylines to the others’ dirt and betrayals, lust and angst and longing: all human, or at least French, life is here. Ridiculously good fun; yet still clever, wise and warm, and I’d go so far as life-affirming. Lends us hope there might be life after lockdown. Preferably in that Paris bar.
And you can learn a lot culturally from subtitles. A fresh language has burst on to our screens: Finnish, coming a little late to the neighbouring Scandi party with the arrival of All the Sins, a more than half-decent thriller series. One of the cops about to fly from the capital to the bonkers north arrives flustered at Helsinki airport with apologies. “Got the gate wrong. Had to run around like a snuff pouch in a toilet bowl.” And there’s something so delightfully Finnish about that unique simile.
Among the fricatives and umlauts there’s a nasty little story to be unearthed among a remote Laestadian community whose piety so far seems matched only by its capacity for corruption. Intriguingly, the female half of the police team has been given a character quirk not yet seen in that long, long list of “interesting” cop quirks – an exuberant openness to sex. Sanna Tervo has, within two nights of arriving in Clenchpit (all right, it’s actually called Varjakka), managed to find the one bar in town and bed the chief suspect and a random biker. You go, girl. She also has a fine sleuthing brain: but Jane Marple, no.
As you’d expect, location is much. I went on to Google Street View to try to get a feel for the landscape of that vast, lonely land, and spent what now seems months wandering, click after click, through birch forests, frozen mud, piety and bleakness. Which, I think, is the closest I’m getting to a holiday this year.
A disappointing codicil to last year’s terrific The Trump Show arrived in the form of a Downfall special, charting events around the US election and that gentleman’s refusal to go gently, concluding naturally with the storming of the Capitol by a remarkable conglomeration of asshats.
The original three-part series was notable mainly for great access to talking head insiders and a refreshingly non-partisan, analytical approach, but this had neither, really. It felt insubstantial and rushed, as if it had to leap on to our screens before the world forgot Donald Trump.
Nigel Farage was there to cheerlead, although he grew strangely silent around (or, worse, had not even been pressed by producers for his thoughts on) the Washington events of 6 January. The BBC’s Jon Sopel was, for the other side, cataclysmically outraged. The sanest voice was that of short-lived Trumpian mouthpiece Anthony Scaramucci, arguing that the ex-president’s refusal to accept his loss – out of 60 Republican legal challenges post-election, 59 died stillborn in court: there simply was zero evidence of ballot fraud, and it could not be wished into existence – was just the same kind of strategising he had employed in 2016, when he was for much of the year sowing seeds of an electoral stitch-up. Before he was, um, accidentally elected. “This is a cunning sociopath. He’s nuts, but he’s very smart.”
The makers of this should have waited till the dust settled. As so often, less is more. Should have come back in 12 months and given a different perspective, when Biden/Harris have had a year, rather than fretting that their chief subject was at perishable risk of somehow fading to insignificant wisp. I would wager he’ll be lodged firmly in American minds, as totem or as golem, for a fat handful of years to come.
