Why everyone is jumping on the Netflix ‘Lupine’ train

If you are someone who watches Netflix, you were no doubt greeted upon arrival with a recommendation to watch “Lupine”. If you haven’t already started watching it – and with the streamer announcing that 70 million expected households had at least taken a peek in the month of its January 8 debut, even more than “The Queen’s Gambit “, the chances are good. you have – and are averse to spoilers, you might want to stop reading now. The first episode is set up to make you think of one thing, which raises all kinds of questions, and lets you think of another, which raises its own questions. (Oh, there will be questions.) It’s a long bandwagon that you might want to join if you want to be somewhere else for a while, a trip to Paris filled with pretty people and views, action and emotions and just enough meaning – it counts race and class and the like – to make you feel that there is something substantial in the melodrama.

“Lupine” refers to the character of Arsene Lupine, not particularly well known in the United States these days when he was played on the American screen by John Barrymore and Melvyn Douglas among others. (In France, the character has appeared in film adaptations, several television series, at least two daily comics, an operetta, and more.) And yet, for some reason, without any first-hand knowledge, his name was snapping in the big box of pop-cultural junk that’s my brain; I knew, anyway, that he was a “thief gentleman”, like The Saint by Leslie Charteris, or David Niven in “The Pink Panther”.

Inspired but not based on short stories and novels written by Maurice Leblanc between 1905 and his death in 1941, which themselves play a part in the story, “Lupine” (subtitle: “In the shadow of Arsene”) stars Omar Sy as Assane Diop, a first generation Franco-Senegalese in contemporary Paris. A collection of stories from Lupine, a gift from his father – for whom Assane set himself the undeserved fate of revenge in the long-delayed style of the Earl of Monte Cristo – made the books a staple of his life and career profitable and illicit. This fanaticism goes so far as to borrow practical ideas from the stories and construct aliases from anagrams of “Arsène Lupine”, a habit that will attract the interest of a low-level police detective (Soufiane Guerrab like Youssef Guedira) who shares Assane’s love for books. (That the detective also shares an initial with Lupin’s own adversary, Inspector Ganimard, may not be a coincidence.)

If not exactly Robin Hood, Assane, like Lupine, is the kind of criminal who only steals from people who can afford it and probably don’t deserve what they have in the first place, their own earnings. being morally if not necessarily legally ill. – got. Master of disguise, the slightest variation in appearance of which is enough to make him impossible to identify, he does not carry a weapon and only uses his fists in self-defense. Assane is essentially a capless superhero, whose powers include a degree of self-confidence that ensures thugs hanging him from a balcony will either bring him back or that once he goes to jail to retrieve a piece of it. information, he will be able to escape.

If Assane seems practically perfect in every way, he is not Perfectly perfect. His most obvious failure is that his criminal shenanigans and revenge make him less reliable in his daily life, affecting his relationships with ex-partner Claire (Ludivine Sagnier, whom domestic audiences might recognize in “The Young Pope” and ” The new pope ”), who despairs of his inability to show up on time to see his son Raoul (Etan Simon). Like Sy, Sagnier brings a lot of soul to her role – although much less onscreen, she’s as important as Sy to the show’s success – and both actors have great chemistry. The actors who play their teenage flashback, Mamadou Haidara and Ludmilla Makowski, are also awesome and essential in building sympathy. Really, you can remove the action items and build a series around them.

Lupine being a major fictional figure, Sy is a big star in France – he won the César Best Actor award for “The Intouchables”, an international hit – and has played supporting characters in big-name American special effects films. budget (he was Chris Pratt’s assistant in “Jurassic World” and a minor mutant in “X-Men: Days of Future Past”). It was his desire to play Lupine, whom he compared to James Bond (“fun, funny, stylish”), that led to the series, created by British writer George Kay. And it is on its charm that the series relies largely, but not entirely.

Performance and production – it has that uniquely European quality of feeling natural even when it gets sleek – keep the series warm even though the plot is made up of Rube Goldberg gear which requires everything to go right at the right time and for the man. psychology to be 100% predictable. Its physics are classical rather than quantum, you might say, and like the world itself, which becomes more and more curious as you observe things in depth, it is best manipulated on the surface. You don’t want to take too long to determine the likelihood of all of this happening. (This is true of almost every action movie released in the past 40 years, of course.) But with just five episodes of the season streaming, leading to a surprising flashback and cliffhanger, you might want to take your time to watch it.