Au service de la France - Season 1 (2015)

	Also Known As: A Very Secret Service (English)
	Year of first release: 2015
	Creators: Jean-François Halin, Claire Lemaréchal, Jean-André Yerlès
	Actors: Hugo Becker, Wilfred Benaïche, Christophe Kourotchkine
	Country: F
	Genre: Comedy
	Conditions of visioning: March-June 2020, VOD, 10" tablet screen.
Synopsis: 1960: the French intelligence service hires the 23-year-old André Merlaux (Becker). Handsome, well raised, intelligent but impressionable, Merlaux has much to learn to serve and defend the interests of France.
Review: Since its release I was intrigued by this series and I finally took the time to watch its first season. The last good French series I saw was Marseille and I still have to watch its second season. The topic, time-period and style of humor remind of the OSS 117 movies with Jean Dujardin, but as much as I didn't find the movies funny at all, I quite like the series. Should I try the movies again? Probably not because I remember what I hated was the on-purpose exaggerated acting and the not-funny jokes lasting far too long. What they have in common is a humorist look at the French Secret Services at a time when the country still had colonies in Africa, when it was ruled by the General de Gaulle still in everybody's favors after his participation to the WWII victory 15 years prior, when France thought it was a super-power matching USA and USSR, a very chauvinist France. And the success of this humor is in those secret agents (Jacquard, Moulinier and Calot) pretty incompetent but believing they are the best. For example when they mock a CIA agent for a grammatical mistake in French while they don't speak anything else. The series is peppered with such hilarious moments, like when often the agents are organizing their missions to suit their monetary needs, when the excessive administration burden is highlighted, or when the agents strike and expect the world to burn without them but nothing happens. In parallel we witness the growth of the naive main character Merlaux, his love affair with a girl discovering the sexual revolution, some intrigue around the hierarchy of the services, and a light take on the dramatic events which occurred during the de-colonization, especially in Algeria ("L'Algerie c'est la France!" they say). For a more serious take on those events, you should watch Florent-Emilio Siri's 2007 L'ennemi intime. The season doesn't really wrap up its story but rather invites watching the second, which I will do in the near future. 20-minute episodes are easy to fit.
Rating: 7 /10