Netflix streaming "must" -- the Fanny Herrero and Cedric Klapisch series, CALL MY AGENT

What a brilliant idea coupled to just-about-perfect follow-through is the delightful French cable series, CALL MY AGENT (Dix pour cent), available now on Netflix streaming. The idea is so good, in fact, and so original -- I don't recall its ever being done anywhere before -- that one wonders why Hollywood hasn't immediately co-opted it. The series tells the story of a somewhat large and successful agency for French film stars and the staff who work there.

While we get to know that staff and their lives, each episode actually revolves around a different French movie star, playing him- or herself, struggling with a particular problem -- from aging and the need for a little Botox to love and fidelity, child care, dementia, and just about any/everything else you might imagine.

The brainchild of writer Fanny Herrero, shown at left, with some help from director/producer Cédric Klapisch (he directed two of the initial episodes and helped produce a half dozen of them), the series is one of the most consistently entertaining, enthralling, funny, sweet and all-round-delightful shows TrustMovies has lately encountered. It's up there with Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Imposters (season one, anyway; I have not yet seen season two).

Why Hollywood hasn't done this probably involves how huge, often ugly, heartless and far too humorless La La Land actually is. The French film industry, at least according to a number of its actors whom I've interviewed over the years, is just small and cozy enough -- like maybe a great big family, with all the warmth, anger, differences and ups-and-downs most families encounter -- to make a series like this one actually kind of plausible.

When I first began watching the series, while I loved each episode and every sparking moment, I also wondered how folk not as familiar as I with French films and their stable of actors might react to it. For many Americans, even those who occasionally attend foreign films, their knowledge of French movie stars may begin and end with Isabelle Adjani or Juliette Binoche (and, yes, both these stars get an episode here). So far, however all those people to whom I've recommended Call My Agent have fallen in love with it, too.

Ms Herrero has managed to create, via her agents and their helpers (shown on poster, top, and in the photos above), a group of people with whom we fall in love and are happy to stick with through thick and thin.

Ms Binoche, above, gets to end the second season with an episode that finds our agents at the Cannes Film Festival, and it shows off this actress' ability for goofy humor in a manner than Bruno Dumont could learn from.

Along the way we see actors such as Virginie Efira and Ramzy Bedia (above), the great François Berléand (below, playing Don Juan opposite a large, plastic yellow duck),

and the versatile Audrey Fleurot (of Spiral and the new Netflix series, Safe) as a recent mother who, below right, must learn to pole dance for her next role.

Each of the problems that confront these actors is so well-chosen and different, one from the next, that interest and enjoyment never flag. Further, each famous actor gives herself/himself over so completely to whatever is at hand that your respect and admiration for these "stars" should only increase.

That's Line Renaud and Françoise Fabian (left to right, above) as feuding old acquaintances, and Cécile de France (below, center) as the actress facing the perennial face-lift challenge.

And yet, with all this star power, what really makes the series zing and swing is the fabulous cast assembled to play the agenting staff. Every one of these actors deserves stardom (and may have it soon), so very well-chosen and talented is each. It is their characters and their stories that finally make this series as charming and addicting as it is. Miss this one at your own peril.

Call My Agent can be seen now on Netflix, in its first two seasons. We fans are now eagerly awaiting season three.

THE BUREAU: Smart 'n classy French TV series from Eric Rochant gets exclusive U.S. run via the SundanceNow Doc Club

For those may have found the French TV series Spiral a little too over-the-top regarding sex, violence and very dark doings, here comes a new French television show that has already won awards and popularity: THE BUREAU (Le Bureau des Légendes), which will have its American premiere this coming Monday, October 3, streaming via the SundanceNow Doc Club, that purveyor of first-class documentaries and -- very occasionally -- some interesting narrative ventures, as well.

Created by Eric Rochant, shown at right, who wrote three of the (20 thus far, though only the first ten are being shown now) episodes and directed eleven of them, the series details the workings of a supposed top-level French intelligence agency and several of its employees (or shall we call them "spies"), both high level and low. Featured most prominently is Guillaume, aka Malotru (Mathieu Kassovitz, below, who bears a rather obvious resemblance to M. Rochant), who is just now returning to France after a very long posting in the Middle East.

As usual in the spy game, all old ties must be severed thoroughly and completely. This proves a bit more difficult regarding the affair our boy has with his mistress, Nadia (Zineb Triki, below). We also quickly learn some things regarding Guillaume's "professional" life, and about his French family, especially his adolescent daughter of whom he is quite fond.

There is always some glamour attached to things mysterious, and so it is here. Yet what we observe in The Bureau seems less glamorous and much more prosaic and detailed than what we see in so many of our American versions of the same genre.

Those details -- what is stored in the lockers at "work," for instance -- even if they are not true (and how would I know?), prove fascinating and in any case seem real enough to pass muster. Style-wise and visually, the series appears almost documentary direct. It moves along quickly enough, always keeping us on our toes, but it is never super slick and/or Greengrass showy.

Trust and betrayal are generic/epidemic to/in spy stories, and so it is here. Yet The Bureau has been able to add a few new wrinkles to the meaning of betrayal. As it moves along, the series grows ever mores dense, with subplots involving the training of a new recruit (Sara Giraudeau, above), as well as whether an old one may have sold out his employers, as well as his co-workers. The latter involves the use of a most interesting behavioral psychologist (played by the excellent Léa Drucker, below)

The theme of trust broken keeps raising its head, making certain we understand how difficult it is to ever really know anyone. Only three episodes were provided us critics to preview. But these were enough to quickly corral TrustMovies. If all ten had been provided, he'd have probably binge-watched the lot.

Look for the debut of The Bureau this coming Monday, October 3. via the SundanceNow Doc Club, which you can learn all about -- and maybe join -- by clicking the previous link. (Above is that splendid actor Jean-Pierre Darroussin, as special here -- playing the head of the bureau -- as he always is.)

SPIRAL fans, rejoice: Season 5 -- the best yet -- is out now on DVD via MHz Network

As ever, the French cops/lawyers/judges/justice series SPIRAL (Engrenages) resonates darkly like little else you'll find on television anywhere. Season 5 of this remarkable show offers up children as its central theme -- one barely conceived, another dead, and the rest in various and tricky places on the spectrum in between. Parenting, too, comes in for a licking, as we see some truly shocking instances of the very bad sort and what this can lead to in the later lives of the participants.

The same six lead characters are back again and in their usual fine form. One of the things that makes the series resonate so strongly is how these characters continue to grow and change -- with their strong and weak points both contributing to this growth and change -- while engaging us with remarkable strength and force. The other thing is that makes Season 5 so compelling lies in the surprises that await us. These come both from the exquisite plotting and the fine characterization by the series creator, Alexandra Clert (shown above), the currents writers and the lead performers, each of whom gets better with each new season.

What we have this time begins with the murder of a mother and her child, and the surprise pregnancy of one of our "heroes." There is also a series of robberies going on in which young hoodlums on motorcycles and thieves in stolen cars wreak their havoc on the citizenry. A "snitch" turns out to be an unlikely if self-serving ally, and the initial suspect in the murder case appears to be possibly innocent.

Judge Roban (the marvelous Philippe Duclos, two photos up) has grown hardened in surprising ways, while lawyer Joséphine Karlsson (everyone's favorite French redhead, Audrey Fleurot) has both softened and strengthened. (The latter is shown above with that fine actor Louis-Do de Lencquesaing, here in an ace supporting role.)

That pug-ugly and extraordinarily sexy actor Thierry Godard (above, right) deepens and broadens as the cop, Gilou, while Captain Laure Berthaud (Caroline Proust, below, left) must deal with her usual work-related business while deciding how and even if to welcome a newcomer to her life. (The French -- and perhaps still too Catholic -- attitude toward pregnancy and abortion is given a very interesting workout here.)

Tintin (Fred Bianconi, above) is having his usual family problems, and that other lawyer, Pierre Clement (stalwart hero Grégory Fitoussi)  has gone from prosecutor to the defense side and is handling the case of the prime suspect. It is via Pierre's character that the series offers one of its biggest surprises to date. M. Fitoussi, below, left, is shown with Olivier Chantreau, who brings a nice combination of outsized anger and bleak confusion to the role of of the prime suspect.)

As ever, the insistence on the inclusion both good and bad in our six lead characters and most of the major supporting ones makes the series infinitely more complex and believable than many others of this genre. And the addition this time of actress Shirley Souagnon in the role of a character named Karen Hoarau, aka Oz, proves a terrific piece of casting and acting. Ms Souagnon, below, makes a memorable impression indeed.

For anyone new to this fine series, begin with the first through fourth seasons, all of which are available via Netflix and Hulu. Season 5, however, is available on DVD only from MHz Networks, and for anyone who can't wait, that would be the place to order it -- for sale or streaming (soon) via the new MHz Choice option. 

Wine now -- and forever: Jonathan Nossiter's full-length MONDOVINO debuts via Icarus Films

If you saw and fell in love with Mondovino, the 135-minute documentary movie from 2004 that tackled the question of whether or not "fine wines" were becoming "mass produced" around the world as one of the earlier products of globalization, here is some very good news. We knew, even at the time of the docu-mentary film's release, that this movie was a cut-down version of the more than nine hours made by Jonathan Nossiter (Sunday, Signs and Wonders) for French TV that really got into things. But would we ever be able to see the entire series? At last, more than a decade later and thanks to KimStim and Icarus Films, we can.

The newly released (in the USA) MONDOVINO: The Series lasts 550 minutes on four DVD discs, and there' s not one of those minutes I'd want to give up. I remember thinking at the the time that I watched the shorter movie version that I wished it could go on much longer. Now we can bask in all that was left out from that two-hour and fifteen minute film. It's a lot -- not so much that any of the many personages that dot the film were totally left out, but now, we come back to them again and again, as Nossiter (shown at right) pieces together everything that was happening to wine production, marketing and sales during this time period.

Here is a brief overview of the ten chapters, the first of which, Where's Asterix?, peaks our interest immediately with the question of why no one in a small French town wants to talk about The Mondavi Affair and what, exactly, happened here and why. Nossiter begins to probe, and we meet some of the wine folk who will appear again and again throughout, including one especially reptilian fellow (to my mind, at least) named Michel Rolland (shown above).

With Chapter 2: Magic Potion we spend some more time with Burgundian wine maker Hubert de Montille and his family (above), and as we hear him and his speak about their life and work, suddenly many of those formerly silly-sounding adjectives describing wine begin to make sense. We also see some of the elitism of the wine owners and growers vis a vis the students who are hired as grape pickers.

Chapter 3: Rome Wasn't Built in a Day whisks us off to Napa Valley, California, where expressions such as synergy and feng shui are bandied about. The wealthy wine folk here come across as generally shallow, image-conscious, entitled hypocrites. (Above are shown two members of the Mondavi family.) Simply hearing what the local liquor store owners have to say about these people pretty much seals the deal. Mr Nossiter never bulldozes; he simply asks questions and allows his interviewee's answers to become the noose that effectively hangs them.

We move from the French Pyrenees to Sardinia in Chapter 4: Pax Panoramix, and meet a Brooklyn-based wine importer Neal Rosenthal and learn about young wines versus the old, with some very interesting and apt comparisons between wine production and plastic surgery. There's even a bit about Nazi collaboration during WWII.

We meet famed (or infamous, depending on your "take") wine critic Robert Parker (above) in Chapter 5: The Appian Way, and also learn about a then-relatively-new mode of production called "garage wines." You may note along the way the occasional look at the household pets or local birds. Nossiter has an eye for all sorts of fun moments and odd objects.

We also begin to hear more and often, especially in Chapter 6: Quo Vademus, the word terroir, and we begin to understand the great important of this. As the Wine Spectator editors explains, "Terroirs go against the business of globalization." We also see more of wine critic Robert Parker, hear the love story of the De Montilles, and discover some delightful stuff about one of our favorite actresses, Charlotte Rampling.

Chapter 7: All Road Lead to Rome tackles wine fraud and the psychology of the wine lover. We hear the prattle of the so-called "industry" wine-makers, especially the head of one company who has decreed that a certain inscription, in Latin yet, be written on every employee's tie or jacket, even though he has not bothered to learn what those actual Latin words are. Mr. Parker's arrogance and egotism are also on fuller display. "It's the Hollywoodization of wine," as distributor Neal Rosenthal insists.

We're back in Italy for Chapter 8: Crossing the Rubicon, in which Wine Spectator's then-editor, a Mr. Suckling, says it all in his description of the terroir problem: "They just weren't making wine that people wanted -- except for the locals." The locals, of course, has been producing and drinking wine for decades, even centuries. But what the hell do they know? Mr. Nossiter never stoops to stating the obvious (as I just did), but with a tad's worth of extrapolation, you'll get there, too. We see the children and the dogs again, as the kids do their homework (school is closed, interestingly enough, due to wide-spread, anti-globalization protests).

Around this time, you will begin to wonder if the filmmaker managed to get any footage in which these royal families of wine -- including especially the Mondavis of California -- were not spouting lies and PR platitudes. They treat us and Nossiter as though we were dumb children who must be educated. In Chapter 9: Et tu Brute? we learn about the Antinori and Frescobaldi families and their links to the Mondavis. They deserve each other. In a small but classy Italian wine shop, the husband of the owner explains that all these wines taste the same; they have no identity at all. And we meet the gorgeous Ferragamo family, about whom, "They're too pretty," a member of the Frescobaldi family opines.

We travel to Argentina, for the series' closing chapter, Veni, Vidi, Vendidi, in which a long-time family winery sells its product -- as well as the family name -- to, yes, Michel Rolland, shown above, left. (The  time spent in the car with M. Rolland's driver -- above, right -- may make you wish that Nossiter had gotten the guy alone for some good inside gossip.) And so another country sees its wine co-opted, mass-produced and rolled out with, gosh, a flavor very much like that of the rest of the "best wines" in the "civilized" world. That Argentine family -- pompous, entitled, classist and racist -- could stand in for just about all of the rest of the new wine aristocracy. Finally, we visit, Paraguay, which, in the words of one fellow, is the land of the fake. But at least it is able to admit this.

When this series ends -- all too abruptly -- you'll simply want more. I wish Mr. Nossiter could do it all again, and bring us up to date on what has happened in the 12-15 years since he began his amazing work. Although, from the looks of our world today, the result would depress us even more. And yet Mondovino, The Series, is so consistently vital and so much fun for anyone with a fondness for wine that as depressing as it is, it is also utterly absorbing and absolutely fascinating. And it's available now in a four-disc set, for sale by its distributor, as well as by the usual suspects. 

SPIRAL's fourth season is here at last -- and every bit as strong as one, two and three....

If you're like so many of us Netflix streamers who've been following the dark, ever-justice-seeking, French TV series SPIRAL (Engrenages) over seasons one through three, you'll be glad to know that season four is now available -- and even happier to hear it's as good as the first three. Maybe even stronger is some ways. (Or maybe, as a friend of mine points out, we're just better understanding and appreciating these characters.)

And why not? The half-dozen leading characters, as well as many of the supporting ones, are spectacularly imagined and hugely troubled, yet we love them as much for as in spite of their enormous faults. That they must work together -- judges, prosecutors, defense lawyers and police -- in pursuit of a justice that seems ever out of reach, almost deliberately so, only adds to the series' great pull. (Yes, ever-present class, wealth and power collude here, just as they do in every western, read Capitalist, country -- including China. That alternating visionary/monster Mao must be revolving in his grave.)

In Season 4, a car -- in which a profusely bleeding man, a young woman and another man (the driver) -- speeds along. Instead of taking the wounded to the hospital, as the woman suggests, the driver defers, and they simply deposit the bleeder in a uninhabited wooded area off the side of the road. So begins this 12-part season of generally 50-minute episodes (the final two last one hour or more) which takes in everything from violent, anti-authority revolutionaries as a means to end the class struggle to the plight of illegal immigrants and the love life of our favorite police captain, Laure Berthaud (Caroline Proust, above).

On the judicial front, that so-honest-it nearly-kills-him Judge Roban (the wonderful Philippe Duclos, above) is still trying to crack the facade of the sleaze who have risen to the top ("Shit floats," as someone remarks along the way) while seemingly digging himself deeper into failure. Midway along this season, his career looks to have ended for good.

Kurdistan gun-running takes up some of our characters' time, with that fine young actor Johan Libéreau appearing as the spoiled son of a very ugly family of "patriots." Some plot strands eventually connect, while others do not, but that search for justice remains front and center. The writing and direction, as usual, are generally first-rate, with the pacing particularly fine here, alternating nicely between suspenseful chases and more intimate goings-on.

Everyone's favorite red-hot red-head, Joséphine Karlsson (the luscious Audrey Fleurot) is up to her usual tricks, though this season we learn more about her than ever before, and now the motives for many of her odd, seemingly contradictory actions become clearer. And that prosecutor-turned-defense-lawyer Pierre Clément (played by the series' dreamboat, Grégory Fitoussi) is on tap, too -- now acting as a lawyer for a truly ruthless, nasty crime lord.

The only character that has not yet registered all that strongly is the policeman Fromentin (called "Tintin" and played by Fred Bianconi, above), who this season sort of comes into his own -- and still fails to register much. Tintin's a good guy, a bit plodding and by-the-book, married with kids (and yet a new one on the way). What happens to him and its aftermath this season should have put him on par, in terms of interest, with the rest of the cast. But even now, he doesn't quite make it. Perhaps he's just too "regular" to compete with the rest of this wildly human crew. On the other hand, Tintin does help ground the series, giving us a benchmark of normality against which to measure.

This season (created by Alexandra Clert) also brings back a character we haven't seen since Season 2, which causes a little commotion at the precinct and in bed (or at least in the back of a car). Spiral is is adult show, by the way; though made for French television, it features the occasional full-frontal male package and plenty of female nudity, too. The most violent and dastardly of these revolutionaries (nice job by Jérôme Huguet), is in fact quite the cocksman (shades of Carlos!), leading to what happens at the series' finale. This involves a young woman revolutionary (a very fine performance from Judith Chemla, below) who comes complete with some rather severe emotional problems of her own, which allow us to see, yet again, what bastions of male chauvinism revolutionary groups tend to be -- and how they often attract (as do police departments) exactly the wrong kind of applicants.

As usual, there is the occasional huh? moment. My favorite comes around midway, when Gilot (played by the gruffly sexy Thierry Godard) discovers some shell casings and thus understands that gunfire recently occurred. But we've just heard the sound of that gunfire, which Gilot, too would have heard -- unless instead of going around the corner to bring back binoculars from the unmarked police car, he ended up in Italy. Oh, well. Most police procedurals have these What-were-they-thinking? moments, and Spiral is no different. Just better.

Although this particular season seems overall to be less violent and bloody than some in the past (much of the violence this time round is self-inflicted), the threat of violence is always there and must be dealt with. Hence the suspense that slowly accrues.

Spiral, season 4 (along with the other three) can be streamed via Netflix. So far as I know, this remains the best and only way to see this famous French series here in the U.S.A. And yes, number 4 is one hot season....