2023-09-12 00:00:11
THE MORNING LIST
While creators, producers and broadcasters discuss the future of television at the La Rochelle festival, viewers will appreciate the great performance of the new releases of the week, mainly French even if the third season of The Morning Show does more than good measure.
“Tapie”: I would have liked to be an artist
Over thirty years and a few major episodes in the life of “Nanar”, the biopic by Tristan Séguéla and Olivier Demangel paints as much the portrait of a French self-made man as it paints the picture of a country on the path of economic fracturing. In the guise of Laurent Lafitte (perfect), the son of a heating engineer dreams of success but he does not master the codes. So he starts with singing (the series makes this vocation as a failed artist a powerful driving force for the character), then moves on to household appliances, paramedical… before the activity of the companies he creates or buys at a low price becomes completely secondary to the profit he can derive from it. Rather than delving into the psychology of the man, the series is interested in the consequences – economic, social, legal, personal, etc. – of a career which will lead the man to the city ministry, then to the prison. Balanced by carefully written and performed secondary characters, this headlong rush culminates in a particularly successful final episode, which brings Bernard Tapie face to face with justice and the need to answer for his actions. Man will not grow from it. Neither does capitalism. Me. F.
Series created by Olivier Demangel and Tristan Séguéla, directed by Tristan Séguéla. With Laurent Lafitte, Joséphine Japy, Antoine Reinartz, Patrick d’Assumçao, Camille Chamoux, David Talbot (France, 2023, 7 x 55 minutes). Fully available on Netflix September 13.
“Rictus”: laugh at everything or stop laughing at all?
In a world where laughter, considered degrading and insulting, has been banned, human beings only have at their disposal a horrible grimace (lips pursed downward, tense nose, tucked chin, glassy eyes… special mention to actors) to express their joy. The authorities are keeping watch, reprimanding the recalcitrant: orthodontic anti-laughter helmets for children, “laughing anonymous” sessions for adults. But, against the spirit of seriousness, a resistance is being organized, led by those nostalgic for the world before, those for whom we can laugh at everything. And even the most zealous laughter police, such as Stéphane (Fred Testot), are not safe from an emotion – in this case love – coming to stretch their lips. Beyond the comic potential of the proposal (we often laugh), the series by Arnaud Malherbe and Marion Festraëts (Prize for best French series at Séries Mania) is obviously worth for its attempt to answer the questions of our era on humor and its corollary, offense. In the middle of the gags, which essentially consist of ridiculing this world where kindness, kittens and hamsters have replaced any critical faculty, a more political satire takes shape on the freedom to be oneself and its limits. Me. F.
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