Liaison: Crime and L' Amour

So I just binged Liaison, a six-episode French/British spy thriller that streamed on Apple TV+ two years ago.  It's still up there -- one of the joys of streaming -- and I'm glad it is.  I don't how I missed it when it first aired.  I see that critics gave it mixed reviews, another example of the poor vision and/or hearing of some of the people who somehow continue to share their myopic assessments to hapless readers.

First, I should say that I'm not surprised Liaison was so good.  The French have a knack for putting up excellent police series.  They know when a couple running away from police, or in the police themselves, always find time when they're caught in tight spots, figuratively and literally, to hug, kiss, pull together even more, and do what comes naturally.  This mix of crime and l'amour always hits the spot, if done right. It made Spiral, a French police drama, one of the best ever on screen.  Thus a spy thriller with a French ambience, which after all is a kind of police drama, has big leg up in emotion.

In the case of Liaison, the British, who also have the own appealing ways of presenting a spy story -- epitomized of course by James Bond -- meld with the French to make an once combustible, sarcastic, and devoted production.  Eva Green (Penny Dreadful) and Vincent Cassel (Westworld the series) in the lead roles are in the middle of a high tech, terrorist tale of corruption and those who are struggling to stop it, and it's tough to tell, or supposed to be tough, to tell who is the hero and who is the villain.  Although--

[And here's my warning about spoilers ahead .,.. ]

I said "supposed to be tough," because I never lost my faith for a moment in the these two appealing heroes.  It was fun to see them driving from both sides of the front seat, as well as wielding knives and guns and avoiding their lethal result with a combination of prowess and sheer luck.

Now the short series ended in a way which leaves the tableau wide open for a second season.  I have no idea if that will or won't happen. But if it does, rest assured I won't wait two years to watch it.

A French Village: A Searing Wake-Up Call

I just finished watching A French Village - Un village français - five seasons on Hulu, two seasons (the final two,  two of pieces of an Epilogue so titled) on Amazon Prime.  For a variety of reasons, mostly because I didn't want to rush this experience, irresistible as it was, I semi-binge-watched it, taking in this extraordinary work in I'd guess about a month.

Let me say up front that this series is among the very best ever on television, in any form, streaming or cable or traditional network.  I'd put it right up there with my two other all-time very favorite series, The Sopranos and The Wire.  Like both of those series, A French Village has no villain who is totally bad.  Even the worst have a glint or more of decency or humanity.  And also like those two HBO series, A French Village has no hero or heroine with some serious flaws.  That's why all three of series are so truly human in their stories and perspectives.

A French Village is the story of a fictitious village in France, Villeneuve - near a real village, Besançon - and its Nazi occupation in the Second World War, and, in the Epilogue, the aftermath of that.  No one escapes unscathed.  Every character, if not literally or figuratively destroyed by the experience, is left deeply impaired or indelibly stained.  This is inevitable for all of the collaborators, even the ones who managed to resist a little or more, but also for the resistance fighters, who sacrifice a part of their humanity in their resistance.  The lesson is unspeakably sad, yet at the same time wise, beautiful, and even satisfying.

My favorite characters are two of the outright villains - well, one is outright and the other maybe 60/40 villainous.   Maybe that's just me - but I recall Hitchcock telling Truffaut that his favorites were villains, too.  (I'll try to not deliver any big spoilers in what follows.)

Heinrich Müller is an SS intelligence chief.  He's cold as ice, brilliant, and enjoys meting out pain.  But when he falls into some kind of combination of love and carnal lust with a French woman - it's mostly lust, but there's some feeling there - he's capable of almost being kind and decent, and against all odds I even found myself rooting for him in a scene or two.  Jean Marchetti is French police investigator.  He's no lover of Nazis, but he believes in strong government and has some fascist tendencies.  But he manages to do some very good things, all along, along with the bad - which unfortunately comes to include killing a resistance fighter in a fury, when he's harangued about something he feels deeply guilty about.

Richard Sammel was perfect as Müller and Nicolas Gob as Marchetti, but really everyone was outstanding and memorable in their roles, including Audrey Fleurot and Thierry Godard (who have also been excellent in Spiral - Godard, though he's not related to Jean-Luc Godard, has something of Jean-Paul Belmondo in his look and manner).  A French Village began to air in 2009 and concluded in 2017 in France - or, in American terms, from Obama through Trump.  Sort of disconcerting but instructive to consider that the trajectory in A French Village - Nazi to liberation - is just the opposite of 2009 to 2017 here in America.

Not that Trump is (yet) a Nazi - he's closer to Marchetti than Müller - and I do believe there's more hope for us now in the United States than in Villeneuve in World War II and after, a French village that often feels like a village of the damned, where no one gets out with their soul completely intact.  But in addition to all its other powerful virtues, A French Village is a searing wake-up call for us in 2018 America.

See this marvel of television when you have a month or more.  The French have given us Monet, Debussy, Truffaut, and all the people who made and starred in A French Village.



speaking of Monet ...

No Second Chance: First Place Whodunnit

I'm continuing to feast on the international television and movies Netflix has been bringing us, ranging from Nordic Noir (Dicte and many more) to Cuban cop (Four Seasons in Havana) to Israeli undercover (Fauda).   France is well represented in this, too, with the superb Spiral, which I'll review after I've seen the 5th season on Netflix for free (cheapskate that I am), and Marseilles, which was quite good.

No Second Chance is another French winner, which arrived in France via New Jersey, where Harlan Coben, the American renowned mystery writer, lives and works.   Coben not only wrote No Second Chance, but has a nice cameo at the end, along with Dana Delaney, the only actor American audiences will recognize in this series.

The rest are French, and all excellent.  So is the narrative, which unlike a lot of high-octane kidnap stories, comes packaged with a first-class, whodunnit puzzler.  A father is shot to death, a mother shot and left for dead, and their six-month baby is kidnapped.   The mother, a medical doctor, recovers and sets out to find her baby.

But that won't happen until she or someone else solves the puzzle of what happened in the first place. Suffice to say it's not what it seems to be, as the main detective is just on edge of realizing.   There's a gap of time in the narrative - which was somewhat necessary for one of the crucial developments in the ending - but I think the story would have been even stronger and tighter without it.

But that's a small quibble about a compelling six-episode series,  crème de la crème for international and indeed all television.


silk noir