Citoyens clandestins

Sorry but i am french, i love spy schemes but this show lack of so many things, it was very disapointing. The cast is quite good, but they are too many characters useless and wrongly wrote like Arditi ans Duvauchelle. The plot is very confuse and it suppose to be in 2002 but all the law inforcement looks like they are from the 1980's, specially the Elton John look-alike head of the secret services... The pace is a bit painful and the costume department so cheap that Naïla Harzoune character serms to own like 3 dress like all the other characters... Raphaël Quenard is a good and promising actor, very bankable these days, but the sound mixing made it almost impossible to understand half of his text ( considering he speaks my own langage ) A waist of time and actors, too bad...

Any reviewer will of course notice many many elements in common between those two series: CITOYENS CLANDESTINS and BUREAU DES LEGENDES. Both very well documented concerning French Intelligence agencies who fight against each other as well as against terrorist threat. As you can guess it is complicated, complex, with plenty of characters whose fates are parallel before crossing. Excellent scheme for a series, but hard to follow. But after all, that's the charm of those series, ins'it? The Lynx character may be miscast, but this role is supposed to be a chameleon, a clandestine agent supposed to have several personalities, identities, "legends" as they call in Intelligence world. Adapted from DOA's novel, a writer who also gave us the book from which the movie SERPENT AUX MILLE COUPURES was produced. Good stuff.

I liked this but one aspect irritated me. I speak fluent French but I'm going deaf and I watch even English programmes with subtitles. The texts provided here were good except for the translation of the French words "les barbus". Literally it means "the bearded ones/guys" in the sense of conservative Muslims. It was translated as "the beards" in the English subs. We don't say that. A better choice would have been " the fundies" or simply "the Islamists".

The programme started in a very complicated way flicking from country to country and town to town. It was so bitty I thought at one point I might have to give up. I'm glad I didn't. In the end everything meshed together into a coherent story of the prevention of a terrorist attack by any means necessary. And some of those means were illegal, ruthless and mortal.

As the body count piled up, there were a couple of human interest stories going on but these never really took off in a meaningful way; the action was concerned with the prevention of an atrocity and these diversions served mainly to reinforce that narrative.

I enjoyed this. It was a little difficult to get into, as I mentioned above, but once the groundwork had been absorbed, the tale took over with enough realism and intrigue to draw the viewer in.