Marseille - Season 1 (2016)

	Also Known As: -
	Year of first release: 2016
	Creator: Dan Franck
	Actors: Gérard Depardieu (Les Anges Gardiens), Benoît Magimel (La Haine, La Vie est un long Fleuve tranquille), Géraldine Pailhas, Nadia Farès (Les démons de Jésus, Les rivières pourpres)
	Country: F
	Genre: Polar, Thriller
	Conditions of visioning: July 2017, VOD, 10" tablet screen
Synopsis: The Mayor of Marseille Robert Taro (Depardieu) is planning on retiring and leaving the town hall to his protege Lucas Barres (Magimel), until he gets betrayed by this one.
Review: Following the trend observed in the US, in France as well big movie stars are nowadays very present in modern TV-series, some produced by Netflix like this one. The political games in Marseille remind me of House of Cards, but scaled down from the US presidency to the mayorship of France's second biggest city, and adapted to match its people / climate / history / interests... I never liked French Polar or Thriller TV-series, always finding them too staged, with theatrical actors out of the Academy and/or with too limited ambition. I was glad to see that Marseille is quite different, probably partially thanks to the showrunner and director of five episodes: the acclaimed Florent-Emilio Siri of whom I liked Nid de guêpes in 2002, an action thriller in enclosed space homage to John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13, his first Hollywood movie Hostage with Bruce Willis, the polemic L'ennemi intime about the Franco-Algerian war, but not so much his first comedy Pension Complète. He also directed the story of a video game series (Splinter Cell). In fact from him I miss only his first movie Une minute de silence and the recent biopic on French pop star Claude François Cloclo. Note that Benoît Magimel stars in most of his movies. Marseille contains just enough characters and sub-plots to stay interesting (and tense) through the eight episodes of its first season: treason, power games, love and life stories, corruption... Even Depardieu that can be antipathetic has the right place here, and in fact turns out to play a character at the opposite of what I was expecting after last seeing him in 36 Quai des Orfèvres.
Rating: 6 /10