Fiasco, a (real) serial disaster served on a platter

“Fiasco”. What madness to title a series like that! You might as well give a tree trunk to get beaten up. Even more perilous to imagine this fiction in seven episodes as “The Office” in the French style. Let’s hope Steve Carell never learns that director Igor Gotesman (to whom we owe the series Family Business with Jonathan Cohen) claims such a Source of inspiration. It would be embarrassing. How embarrassing it is to see Pierre Niney, former resident of the Comédie-Française, in the trappings of Raphaël Valande, a hope of French cinema whose first feature film intends to pay homage to his grandmother Huguette (Marie-Christine Barrault), resistant during the Second World War. Except that nothing is going to happen as the director planned.

From the first clap to the last shot, it is a real discomfiture into which the young director plunges headlong and often stupidly. This is also the only face that Niney offers. That of a sub-Barton Fink, of a tough guy who cannot assert himself against his main actor, Vincent Cassel, cannot declare his love for his actress (Leslie Medina) and does not know how to say no to his best friend, ready to do anything (really anything) to get a role (François Civil).

In series, too much cretinism is not the enemy of good. Larry David owes his glory to him. Just like Steve Carell. But if naivety is the grace of great men, here it is the farce of a great actor stuck in a story that is totally repetitive, to the point of becoming trying. A story which bounces around heavily and which, even more serious for a supposed parody, is never funny. Everything is laborious here, even the handling of the second degree which could have machine-gunned one by one the clichés which, on the eve of the Cannes Film Festival, reign over French cinema.

Only Géraldine Nakache and Juliette Gasquet save their skins in this disaster that Netflix serves us on set. The first as an assistant bordering on nymphomania. The second as an intern for the assistant who, barely out of adolescence, brings a bit of reason to this mess. As if they were trying, but in vain, to give some substance to this pochade. Because that’s what it’s all about. This series looks like a bad idea born at the end of a drunken evening. Igor Gotesman and Pierre Niney are very friends. Too surely, to tell the truth: it was a failure.