Children of Truffaut: Call My Agent!

 

The TV series “Lupin” has been getting most of the media attention, but another series from France is also a streaming hit: the human comedy “Call My Agent!”  Made for French TV beginning in 2015 and broadcast as “Dix Pour Cent” (Ten Percent), it was soon picked up worldwide, including by Netflix in the U.S.

 Originally conceived to run four seasons (all now available for streaming, with the fourth season this year), it was recently announced that there will be a fifth season, following a 90 minute TV movie.  Meanwhile, other nations are making their own copies, including an English language version shot in the UK.

 “Call My Agent” is about a struggling Paris talent agency with star movie actors and directors for clients.  The series follows the agents interactions with usually one or two French film stars in each episode, as well as depicting the drama and comedy in their own lives.  

 Netflix made a key decision in not dubbing “Call My Agent!” (as it does most other foreign-made series.) It relies instead on subtitles.  It was a daring but brilliant move, because the sound of the French language—even for those of us who don’t understand it—is essential (as well as a subtle reminder that most Americans who have seen French films, saw them with subtitles.)  The reason is simple: this series is very, very French.  Or more specifically, it is the French as we have seen them in exported French films.

 So I find it strange that the U.S. media I’ve seen never seems to acknowledge this essential quality.  Even the creators and producers of the series only mention American television programs, the “workplace” dramas and comedies like “The West Wing” (or they do when talking to American media.)  

Truffaut in a dream sequence in Day for Night

Yet the most obvious progenitor of this series is the French director Francois Truffaut.  Specifically it is the child in subject and spirit of Truffaut’s 1973 film “Day for Night” (“La Nuit Americaine), which is about the making of a movie, the personalities and relationships on the set, and the interactions with the movie business, the outside world and non-movie people. The peculiarities and complexities of actors and others in the theatrical and moviemaking world, and their shared love of their art, are at the heart of "Day for Night" and ultimately of "Call My Agent!"

 There are echoes of other French directors as well (including Claude Lelouch, who appears in the series) but to me Truffaut’s influence is the clearest. Several times I’ve thought while watching, “this is a Truffaut moment.”  I was feeling that strongly in the third season episode in which a baby was born in the agency office—and then suddenly the unmistakable Baroque theme from “Day for Night” played on the screen.

 It also doesn’t hurt that at least a couple of the French film stars who appear in the series previously worked with Truffaut and often are identified with him: Isabelle Adjani and Nathalie Baye (who appeared in three Truffaut films, including “Day for Night.”)   

J-P Leaud with Jacqueline Bisset and Truffaut in
Day for Night

The series character, the agent Gabriel, is highly reminiscent of the characters Antoine Doinel (in several Truffaut movies, starting with his first, “The 400 Blows”) and the actor Alphonse in “Day for Night,” both played by Jean-Pierre Leaud: placid and charming, who suddenly explodes with impetuous passions, yet is basically good-hearted.  When Gabriel tells an outrageous lie in order to deny financing to a film because he’s jealous of his actor girlfriend’s relationship with the film’s director/star, it’s exactly the kind of move Doinel/Leaud would make.

 The character of the young Camille (who we follow first in season one, but who unfortunately often fades into the background thereafter) has that Truffaut mixture of intelligence and innocence.  It’s a part Nathalie Baye might have played in a Truffaut film.

 At the same time, this series is a descendant, not a copy.  The cast is multicultural, the relationships are not all heterosexual, the visual style is contemporary. The acting is first rate.  I wouldn’t be surprised to see several win acting awards in the U.S.: Camille Cottin (as Andrea), the fearless Laura Calamy (Noemie), Gregory Mantel as Gabriel, and perhaps more.

 Still, the overall affect of the series—intelligent, ironic, yet sincere, with moments of exhilarating humanity—is very French, and goes with the language, the gestures, and the style. (Even the older male agent Mathias dresses with understated French elegance.)  In terms of narrative style, the characters may be at time excessive, but are never cartoons.  This perhaps most of all is what viewers of the best French films expect.

 In a fourth season episode, Gabriel and his ravishing, now ex-girlfriend Sofia, are talking at a party.  He tells her a tall tale which she is believing, until he admits he’s making it up.  But he says that her wide-eyed belief “is very moving.”  Those are words, and this is a moment, that in my experience can only occur in a French film.

  Maybe a British series about a talent agency based on these characters can work.  But it will be very, very different.

The Connection

"You said that we owe literature almost everything we are and what we have been. If books disappear, history will disappear, and human beings will also disappear. I am sure you are right. Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence. Some people think of reading only as a kind of escape: an escape from the "real" everyday world to an imaginary world, the world of books. Books are much more. They are a way of being fully human." 

 Susan Sontag
 "A Letter to Borges"
quoted by Jonathan Cott in his new book, Susan Sontag: The Complete Rolling Stone Interview (Yale.)

 photo from Truffaut's film version of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451

They connect us to the past, to the many dimensions of our past, and to the future, by which the past is given meaning beyond itself.  They connect the unknown, the hidden and even furtive parts of ourselves to the many dimensions of our world, and of the universe, in the present.  They make connections, which is the very life of the mind...  Some ways of being more fully human.

from Jules et Jim

The Man Who Loved Movies

This post is personal reminicence, inspired by an issue of the alumni magazine of Knox College, where I was an undergraduate. And if you've arrived here from the Knox site, welcome. This particular site has become a more personal one over the past few years, though it's more about personal obsessions than a day-in-the-life.

For those who were at Knox when I was, you might be interested in a couple of other sites I've just started: 60s Now and the Boomer Hall of Fame.

I post on current events affecting the future on Captain Future's Dreaming Up Daily. If you took astronomy with me, and happen to recall my Captain Space hat, you won't be surprised at that title, nor my Soul of Star Trek blog.

And if you'd like to catch up on my past published writing, some of my favorite magazine and newspaper pieces are at Kowincidence. Now, forward to the past.

I was pleased to see Jay Matson on the cover of Knox Magazine, and to read of the Alumni Achievement Awards to David Axelrod and Bill Barnhart.

Though he identifies himself as a philosophy major, Jay Matson was known on campus foremost as a poet, at least by his senior year, when I was a freshman. We were all in awe of him---his quiet, brooding figure defined “the poet” for me. When Mary Jacobson (who I essentially---or was it existentially?-- adored) told me that my writing had been singled out as promising (for a freshman) by Jay Matson, I felt I had something to live up to.

Then I recall visiting his farmhouse several years later, where a water pipe had burst from the cold, and several rooms were virtual skating rinks. I didn’t see him on my visit to Galesburg in the early 1980s, but I did write about his success transforming historic downtown buildings in my book, The Malling of America.

As the editor of the Knox Student, Bill Barnhart honed his journalistic skills in a tumultuous time on and off campus, and he also had to deal with several unruly columnists, like Skip Peterson, Mark Brooks, Kevin Cameron (unless he was gone already), and me: wild men all.

But the person I want to acknowledge most is David Axelrod. David ran the Cinema Club, which I believe was his invention as well. He chose, booked and exhibited foreign films, pretty much monthly as I recall. This may not sound like a big deal now, but consider this: at the time there were few film courses anywhere in American colleges, and none at Knox (I believe the first at Knox was a filmmaking course given by Richard Alexander of the English department in 1967 or so.) Only a few small theatres in major cities showed foreign films at all (and of course this was before video stores and cable TV.) Movies in general were still considered disposable entertainment.

So beginning with my freshman year, I bought the little card that entitled me to see these movies with strange titles, identified as well by the magic names of the directors: Bergman, Fellini, Godard, Antonioni, Truffaut, Kurosawa… I used to read the titles and names and try to imagine what the movie would be like. When I went to them, sitting in the darkness and staring at these strange apparitions of light, I understood very little of what I saw that first year. But gradually I absorbed their vocabulary, and by the time David graduated, I was a film buff for life.

Although my screenwriting efforts got me no further than an entertaining Hollywood lunch with a William Morris agent (our waitress had been a stand-in for Lillian Gish, who she still resembled), and writing and even directing a few videos for clients, I did wind up writing a lot about film, for various periodicals. This not only involved seeing hundreds of movies but doing interviews on Hollywood sets and on one occasion, spending an hour talking with Francois Truffaut, and exchanging letters afterwards. (I even told him about the scene in which he and Godard—his friend and later New Wave rival—have a shootout, in the last play I wrote and directed at Knox. He laughed.)

The resulting article was in Rolling Stone, called "The Man Who Loved Movies." He liked it, and a piece I did on the (now lost) art of double features, which mentioned a pairing of two of his films. Both of them are reproduced over at kowincidence. (Which was a name given to me, by the way, by the ineffably beautiful Mary Jacobson. (I can see her cringing at my word choice.) I used it for the name of my temporary band for my one and only rock and roll record. But that's another story. )

I’m pretty certain I saw Truffaut’s “Shoot the Piano Player” at Cinema Club, probably my first Truffaut film. I just watched the DVD of it last week, with commentary by Annette Indsdorf, Columbia film professor. I met Annette when she was Truffaut’s translator for his U.S. retrospectives in 1979. Just another link in my life that began with the Cinema Club.

With his dark hair falling in his eyes, David was a personality and a presence at Knox. His off campus apartment featured a homemade reproduction of a Modrian painting (“Broadway Boogie-Woogie”)? rendered with colored tape, as assembled by the rapturously lovely Judee Settipani. I remember him as not saying a lot, and saying it softly (not like some of us loudmouths) but after due consideration, making it count.

I remember some of his pronouncements to this day, and not all of them about film, though this one was: he pointed out to me that the world is not black and white, so black and white movies are inherently abstract. It’s a basic concept now, but at the time it was profoundly new, at least to me, and especially impressive because it seemed to be an insight he’d reached on his own.

The only times I’ve seen him since Knox were in movie theatres: once in Chicago, and once in the mid 1970s at the Orson Welles Cinema in Cambridge, MA. (Actually I ran into him in the adjoining restaurant.) At the time I was practically living at the Orson Welles. I was seeing at least 10 to 20 films a week; once I saw 10 movies in one day. I may be an extreme example, but I’m sure there are others whose lives were enriched by what David Axelrod began, as a student at Knox.

UPDATE: If you're interested in David's more recent activities, his web site is, strangely enough, davidaxelrod.com. Which isn't the no-brainer it might seem to be, because there are lots of David Axelrods out there in cyberspace. So I figure he had to be pretty quick to get that url.