Marseille

Just finished (binge)watching Marseille. It's an old fashioned but well made series with a simple straight forward storyline without any sidelines. There are some sex scenes but nothing explicit and they all serve the story (read one review that stated the series was oozing sex but that is nonsense). It's mostly about betrayal and changing loyalties in a small group of people centred around a mayor election in Marseille. The plot is very predictable and does not have surprises, you can see developments coming long before they happen. For a 8 part series the cast is very limited but good, acting is OK but in several parts I was not impressed. It's a Netflix series that will not win any prizes, they made better. Marseille is an interesting town, full of contradictions and a boiling pot full of crime and problems on one hand and promise onthe other side. Have the feeling there was more to be made out of this.

This was supposed to be a French version of something like House of Cards. It is about the rivalry between two candidates for the political leadership in Marseille. Both Gérard Depardieu and Benoit Magimel are two good, and very different, actors for the main characters. This creates an interesting dynamic between the two.

Still, the drama feels quite flat and stereotype in its execution. Actors are overplaying at the expense of nuances, subtleties and leaving basically nothing left to the imagination of the viewer. The storyline feels very linear and predictable, there are too few twists that keeps the interest up. Also it seems like very boring politically correct approach where the good folks always are on the left side and the bad ones always on the right side of politics.

The series could have been so much more than it was. A pity with so strong casting.

No surprise that it was cancelled after two seasons.

The script is born to mimic other political scripts. And be fateful to the nanny state state school indoctrination. Nothing original. Or creative. Stock characters in a stock story. The acting is so and so. The dialogue is crap. So it's hard to blame the actors. And the writers and producers are so in need of information! It is the French white middle class view on both the very low and the very high placed people in their society. A fairy tale about life in the ghetto or the political games. Probably a series about catholic syndicate men (not women), say the railway or the teachers, extorting more money from the rest of the society would have turned out far more engaging.

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Marseille, well the dialogue or script sound like some cheap french soap opera, the scenery though is fantastic, views of the city are what kept me watching this jumbled up mess of a soap opera. Excessive reliance on sex scenes seem almost clichéd, whose screwing who, got to keep track of all of that useless drivel, scriptwriters should of got on with developing some proper dialogue and in depth characterization. The characters all come across as clichéd and tiresome, dreary dreary, but the panorama shots of the city do look so good. The marvelous french architecture and historic city buildings are interesting backdrops to all of this. It is supposed to be quite the crime infested city, and I guess that is real to a point, but I wish they could have given the characters more dimension, and stop with the excessive useless tiresome overdone sex scenes.

For a French series, I think it's a good beginning to a new era, it will open others ways to explore for the "french series industry" (yes by Netflix this time).

About the series it-self, it's quiet good, the script, trivia, camera shoots are good. Sometimes the dialogues are "weird" and I think even more when you understand French. About the actors, Magimel is good in this role and Depardieu is quite eaten by his past, we know almost everything about his films and there is no surprise about his playing. But all together have a sort of charm in the Frenchie way.

So I'll wait for the season 2.