Due to a dreadful administrative error, it’s taken me until this 190th post to include any boxsets in the French language within my ramblings here. Désolé, everybody. This has not been intentional. Rest assured we’ve had plenty of Spanish (Money Heist and Elite), some German (Dark) and even some Korean (Kingdom) but I’ve been very remiss by omitting la Francophonie. Most particularly, my guilt comes from my own possession of a French degree (or half of one, really). There was a time I could pursue conversation with almost any citoyen, wielding the imperfect subjunctive and having at my disposal vast reams of memorised vocabulary in obscure areas (for some reason, I once knew all the garden birds). I vowed I would never become one of those adults who lost the language skills of their degree, but here I am. The truth is, I spent nine months in Germany for my university-mandated year abroad, but only nine days in France. I haemorrhaged money in Paris during a summer heatwave trying to find a job/set up a whole life before I called it quits and brexited myself. The oral part of my final French exam was abominable, so let’s acknowledge my trauma with the language before we go any further.
This did not stop me jumping on board the Lupin train in recent weeks. Yeah it’s got subtitles, and yeah, even after
twenty grand of student debt got paid off for that French degree, I still
needed them to stand a chance of understanding a word of what was going
on. I’m of the ability where I can read
the onscreen transcription really quickly and then compare it to the words the
cast utter, using the text as a clue, and then making pointless comments to
myself such as: hmm, that was an interesting approach to rendering that expression
idiomatically in English. Worse still,
given the UK’s international pointlessness, we’re rendering things into
American English. But this is boring for
everyone and doesn’t matter; Lupin is a great watch. Just don’t destroy it by plumping for the dreadful
dubbed versions that Netflix
offers.
Our hero is actually Assane Diop, the son of a Senegalese
man who came to France with big dreams.
Our star, therefore, is Omar
Sy. Not a household name in the UK, and
I had only ever seen him in Jurassic
World doing not much besides caressing a velociraptor while Chris Pratt pulled all the
expressions. I have a problem with watching
that film over and over and Sy is consistently one of the most compelling
parts, alongside my obsession with any storyline that involves things going
wrong at a theme park. Nevertheless,
Lupin is the Omar Sy show and people of all linguistic bents should gather around
and be drawn in. You might be wondering
where the Lupin bit comes in then. Well,
Arsène Lupin is
actually the 1900s literary creation of Maurice Leblanc. A bit like our Sherlock Holmes only
with a different signature hat and a career on the other side of the law,
Arsène Lupin’s gentlemanly thefts still inspire imaginations to this day, none more
so than Diop’s.
In present-day Paris, Sy’s character enacts a thrilling
series of heists under the noses of many a member of the snooty elite. As a black man, he’s often able to exploit
racial prejudice to his advantage, dressing as a cleaner in the opening episode
and therefore becoming invisible to anyone with money. At first, you might just think he’s a bit of a
Jacques the lad with sticky fingers. But
no, this all ladders up to a life’s mission to avenge the death of his
father. Cue flashbacks to Diop’s
youth. His pa works for the high-net-worth
Pellegrini family but they’re clearly bad news because the patriarch shouts a
lot (proving money doesn’t buy happiness).
Finding himself in the care system, Diop’s only comfort becomes the gentleman
thief and his stories, and thus a modern-day Lupin is born.
You’ve got Paris at its best and worst, some mixed-ability policemen on his trail (I believe these are what the French call “les incompétents”), the rich being dreadful towards the poor, racial injustice, family scenes where a super cool thief has to work hard to impress his teenage son, and enough French in which to bathe your ears that it’s like a GCSE listening exercise only you don’t have to write down any answers for the teacher to mark. Sy immediately charms you into rooting for our hero, and the plot in both its episodic and series-long arcs picks up the pace and the jeopardy until you’re keen to race through with considerable vitesse. Shame, then, that we only get five bits to kick us off with, but Netflix is following up with the next part soon and I, pour un, will be locked down in my flat ready to watch it and be inspired for my own ambitions to become a gentleman thief. Ok then, maybe just a thief.
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