This might be hindsight speaking, but I can’t help feeling there really was less to this series than met the eye. But its (in reality) fairly thin mysteries were revealed with immense style and some truly memorable locations and set pieces – most recently, that creepy shoreline quarry. Truly, Witnesses was an anti-travelogue. And at least Sandra finally ditched those bloody boots.
Thanks as always for contributions that have enlivened this patchily impressive entry in the ever-broadening annals of Euro-noir. A second series is reportedly in the works, although Paul Maisonneuve may be absent. Will you be watching?
The case
Paul cuts a deal with Gorbier, allowing him to see his son in return for information abut the red-headed girl who visited him in prison. It’s Laura (née Valerie), obviously, who was tapping up Kaz for information about the man she blamed for her mother Juliette’s suicide. Except it wasn’t suicide – it was murder. Henri Norbert arranged for Damien to silence her when she threatened to talk about the rape she suffered at the hands of him and his four chums Kremer, Muse, Laplace and Weber. When the Roland Garros Four began to blackmail the aspiring politician Norbert, he then had each of them killed: a situation Laura and her foster-home pal Carl tried to bring to Paul’s attention with the show-home setups.
Kaz, meanwhile, tries a few golf swings in his cell before popping the pills his son slipped him during their second meeting (who cleared that? Maxine, probably) and going to that circle of hell reserved especially for clowns.
Laura sets up a showdown with Norbert, who calls Damien for backup. Norbert is killed during a Mexican standoff, before Sandra flees with a mortally wounded Laura. Damien chases them into a bunker and locks them in, before the police track them down, albeit too late to save Laura. Damien hands himself in, unable to bring himself to commit suicide.
The odd couple
Justin’s future still looks a bit bleak, so Sandra had to fly solo once more and did a decent job, piecing together Laura’s identity, the whereabouts of the wolf and the location of the climactic showdown more or less singlehandedly. Most rewardingly, she dumped her “pieces of shit” boots at the point I was going hoarse from shouting at the screen about them.
In the debit column, she also looks like she might reconcile with bloody Eric, if only for the sake of Chloée. And I did a little sick in my mouth at Sandra and Paul’s final adieu, which was cheesier than out-of-date camembert. But I think it’s safe to say that personal and professional futures look a lot brighter for her than they did six weeks ago.
Paul Maisonneuve
As the eventual focal point of the series, it was probably appropriate that the job of laying out the whole tangled story fell to Paul. Although, frankly, I still don’t know what to make of a man whose enigmatic mask stayed in place until the very end. Was his repentance genuine? Why did he never properly investigate Juliette’s death? So many questions. Still, this was a reckoning of sorts for Paul, who now has to live with Laura’s death on his conscience as well. I fear he may still spend more time brooding over his demons than “remembering the good times”.
Other key players
Henri Norbert: “How much to forget your mum? There’s a one-in-five chance I’m your dad.” What a singularly abhorrent individual Norbert turned out to be. But he still feels more like a sketch than a rounded character – after six episodes, we ought to know a bit more about him.
Damien: Ditto. Would money worries genuinely drive someone to kill on five (eventually six) separate occasions? I’m unconvinced. Nor did I really buy Damien’s transformation from mewling wimp to implacable, T-1000-esque killer.
Laura/Valerie: A desperate life and a desperate end. What else is there to say? I would have liked to find out a bit more about her friendship with Carl (another underdrawn character seemingly invented to tidy up plot points), and I’m still not quite clear what her long game with Paul was intended to be, had he managed to apprehend Norbert and Damien. Would all have been forgiven?
Time of the wolf
The poor old thing, kept locked in a cage on an industrial estate. Bit anticlimactic, really, and I don’t know how Sandra knew that was where it was. In fact, I don’t quite know what the point of using it was at all. Wouldn’t there be more reliable ways to protect yourself, even on the mean streets of Le Tréport? No word, either, on how they managed to acquire the damn thing.
Never mind, there was lupine redemption of sorts, when the wolf was deputised to track down Laura and Sandra. It was hardly his fault that they got there too late to save her.
Thoughts and observations
- Le Tréport tourist board alternative slogan of the week: “Le Tréport, where the beaches are brimming with potential death traps for curious kids.”
- You’re going wolf-hunting while multiple killers are on the loose. Do you: a) take along an expert animal handler? b) go in with a full Swat team? c) not tell anyone and go with one other person?
- I had hoped Gorbier was being confined in some ludicrously elaborate Hannibal Lecter-style contraption.
- I was struck by how well matched Sandra and Damien were in the wildly-inaccurate-shooting stakes.
- What did Laura do with all those chairs stacked up in her flat? She didn’t seem the sort to throw a dinner party.
- I thoroughly enjoyed the last 20 minutes, absurd as they were. Spare dialogue, swelling soundtrack, another superb location and a sense of grim inevitability.
- Someone on the production had a lot of fun spilling their psyche while designing that diary. Grim stuff.
- Loose ends corner: who took the potshots at Paul in the first episode? How/why did Laura choose the female corpses for her happy families? What was Maxine’s job? Why was Justin never granted a surname? How did Damien know Kremer was boarding that ferry?
