Call my Agent. And enjoy

France has been slow in building itself an international reputation for producing TV series. In fact, it wasn’t until … that it released the first series to win a major following outside France, was Engrenages, translated into English as Spiral, a gripping and entertaining thriller series, though one that sometimes pushed credibility rather beyond the limits of plausibility.

Since then, they’ve made several, including under the Netflix name, of greater or lesser quality. None, however, had come close to rivalling Spiral until Call my Agent or, to give its original title, Dix pour cent, from the Netflix stable. The French title is for the fee a theatrical agent will charge a client for finding him or her roles in theatre or films.

The agency is a great setting for all the tensions and poisonous relationships that we’ve come to expect from office-based soaps. This series, though, handles them particularly well: the clever plots and manipulations often blow up in their perpetrators’ faces, and the games that the powerful play sometimes succeed but sometimes fail against a smart counter-move – or simply bad luck.

The cast of Call My Agent: ready to entertain us a lot.
And even surprise us a little
l to r: Liliane Rovère, Stéfi Celma, Grégory Montel, Camille Cottin,
Nicolas Maury, Laure Calamy, Thibault de Montalembert,
Fanny Sidney,  Assaad Bouab

That, indeed, is the great charm of the series: every single episode has an obvious ending that one can predict from the beginning, and hardly any actually ends that way. That makes even the ones that do end the way you’d expect surprising, since it’s so unusual for any of them to do so.

The acting, too, is superb, to the highest level of comedy. We have the female assistant (Laure Calamy) who will occasionally fly into a rage or a panic attack with superb contortions of her body – almost clinical seizures – or the gay male assistant (Nicolas Maury) who makes no secret of his wounded and hurtful feelings, while also proving frequently the smartest person present, with clever suggestions expressed in a gloriously camp voice.

We have the adulterous agent (Thibault de Montalembert), we have the agent who can’t keep a girlfriend (Grégory Montel), we have the old agent who had her glory years decades ago, out of which at least one old flame will appear for our amusement (Liliane Rovère), we have the driven Lesbian who falls in love but can’t help straying, not always with a woman (Camille Cottin), and we have the young ingénue who gives us our protagonist and our benchmark of normality while remaining charming and likeable (Fanny Sidney). And even she has a secret that will dog her for many episodes…

All this is excellent enough but then there’s the structure adopted by the series. These agents have clients and those clients are actors. Some, indeed, are stars, and the producers decided not to use ordinary actors playing stars, but real stars playing ‘themselves’. The quotation marks around ‘themselves’ are there because these are fictional versions of themselves – I don’t think, for instance, that Monica Bellucci would have to spend long in an enforced singleton existence in Paris, unless she truly wanted to.

Juliette Binoche getting ready to open the Cannes Festival

Bellucci is far from the only star we meet. There’s at least one in every episode, and many of them are of the same calibre: Isabelle Adjani, Fabrice Lucchini, Guy Marchand, Juliette Binoche, Isabelle Huppert, to name but a few of the major figures of the last few decades of French cinema who appear in the series.

For the moment, there are just three seasons of six 45-minute episodes each. Perfect binge watching. And much to be enjoyed…