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Thursday, March 18, 2021

Call My Agent: Dix Pour Cent seems like hardly enough to express how good, real, and funny French TV can be.

Psychology of Call My Agent, Dix Pour Cent, Psychoanalysis of Dix Pour Cent, Psychoanalysis of Bingeworthy TV, Psychoanalysis of Call My Agent, Psychology of Dix Pour Cent





The French are symbolic of all that is artsy, difficult, and dense.  In the world of psychoanalysis they have contributed an analyst – Lacan – that sought to rehabilitate Freud and, in the process of doing that, made psychoanalytic thought so complex that it is baffling. 

In Philosophy, Lacan’s comrade in arms Derrida confused us so thoroughly that he propelled us from the Modern World that Freud invented to a post Modern world where we no longer have an objective vantage point from which to view or understand the world.  There is no keel or rudder in this world.  We are adrift.

And French film.  Wonderful stuff – but deeply meaningful – pretentious, even. It is the stuff of art houses.  Filled with meaning and hinting at greater depth – angst laid bare.  Can we even manage to make sense of a corner of it – or it is above our heads?  

So French TV.  Do they even have TV?  Do they stoop to put things on the little box in people’s homes?  Aren’t they too busy reading poetry and making complicated interpretations of it to spend time in front of the telly?

Well, if Call My Agent is any indication, not only do they have TV, they have good TV.  Smart and on target, timely in an unexpected way and, perhaps even more important, funny.  They can laugh at themselves…  Who knew?

The four seasons of Call My Agent, in French with English subtitles at six episodes per season, flew by in our late pandemic fueled binge watching.  Coming to a hit show late (as we did with Schitt’s Creek) can be a blessing because you don’t have to wait for a new season – and remember who the characters are and what was hanging in the cliff hanger for six months – or now, an entire year.  It’s just there to turn to for the next hour.

Though this series is funny – it is primarily a drama.  Generally dramas have a character or characters who are having a crisis.  The world around them is relatively stable, but their inner world – or the hero's relationship with another – is falling apart.  Of course when the hero is a national leader – a king or a queen – there can be national implications, but the personal drives the social upheaval.

The heart of this series is the talent agency that is run by the four principal characters.  Mathias is the top dog – the one who has the biggest stable of stars, the coolest head and owns the most shares.  Andrea is the busiest, hardest working woman you have ever seen who is driven by a desire to create great films.  Gabriel is a nice guy in an industry that is filled with sharks.  And Arlette is the only surviving member of the original Agence Samuel Kerr (ASK), named after the founder who dies in the opening episode.  His death hurtles that agency into four seasons of turmoil where its very existence is constantly in question – and political intrigue within its walls and between it and the world of other agencies and the world of the private lives of the principle actors it represents threatens to tear it apart in every episode.

What is at risk in this show is not just the lives of the characters – which is always part of the drama of any show – but the very fabric of the world that holds them together – and that is the genius of it.  From a distance, adult life seems staid and predictable.  You go to work in the morning, come home at night, and you take two or three weeks of vacation every year and then you retire.  Oh, you might get a divorce, but you remarry.  You might get laid off, but you find a new job.  Some have opined that men watch sports and follow politics because this is the only thing in their lives where the outcome is not predetermined. 

Then there’s a pandemic.  Or a rogue candidate gets elected President, and suddenly the world does not seem so stable.  And we look around at work, and it doesn’t seem so systematic and under control.  We are suddenly exposing ourselves to risk in order to do our job and we are being paid less for doing that.  And we begin to wonder whether anything is stable.  And this show clarifies that none of it is.  Not just now, but ever.  Adults have been pretending, essentially forever, that the world is a stable place – and drama has helped us with the illusion.  This drama proclaims that to have been a farce.  We are, in fact, at the mercy of ourselves and everyone around us at every moment, and it all can come crashing down – with or without warning…




Mathias, who seems so confident and in charge and concerned about the agency and the clients – he caters to them in caring and considerate ways – tries to steal a client from Gabriel.  The client has been told that she is too old to star in a Tarantino film and quits Gabriel in a huff.  Mathias manipulates her into trying plastic surgery to salvage her looks, knowing that it will interfere with the essential beauty of her acting – the subtlety of her emotional expression – but it will land the big American dollar contract (and make her his client, not Gabriel’s).  Mathias pretends that his wife has had the surgery and tells the actress where to get it.  When she freaks out at the surgeon’s office and runs out the door without the surgery, Gabriel is waiting there to pick her up – to remind her that she does not need the surgery – and to re-sign her as his client because he knows who she is and what she really needs, which is not a big time contract from the Americans.  Crisis averted.  But now we know that Mathias is not to be trusted (or we should know that – I, more naïve than not, continued to be surprised by the characterization from the other agents that Mathias was a cutthroat, just as I naively continue to assume that my co-workers are primarily interested in the good of the institution – when some of them are there primarily there out of self-interest).




Andrea’s entry is powerful.  She is a dynamo of activity all day long, driving her assistant to quit from the pressure – so that she hires another woman on the spot – not realizing that this is the bastard daughter of Mathias (sorry about that spoiler – there will be fewer here than in most of my reviews, but it is important to realize the incestuous/nepotistic quality of this work place – friendships, family, and colleagueship are all in the stew in various ways for each character).  Andrea works hard all day and then parties hard at night, picking up women and then tossing them aside.  As much as she likes sex, she likes her job more, and her partners don’t like playing second fiddle to her work, but she is able to replace them readily.  Gabriel is her close friend.  As compassionate and caring as he is about his clients, she is about her movies.  These two are motivated by what is best, if not for the agency, for something outside of themselves.  Gabriel – rare in this industry – actually cares for his clients.  Andrea cares about the quality of French Film.  In this, she would seem to be the most French of the characters, but if this is true, it is modern, cutthroat French, not the old (and here I have my tongue very much in my cheek) lovely, soft French who’s every act of living is a lovely esthetic exercise.




Gabriel is a good guy, but this also means he is a bit of a sucker – and he gets drawn into a relationship where he is in way over his head.  His assistant, Herve, is poignant fellow who helps manage the clients but also Gabriel.  And the assistants, Mathias’ assistant Noemie, Herve, and Andrea’s assistant (and Mathias’s daughter) Camille exemplify what the agency is about and in many way live its ideals more so than the partners.  They truly believe in the work that is being done, while the agents are all a bit more jaundiced about it.  The functioning of the assistants then, mirrors my experience of many of the support staff at the institutions that I have worked with – they idealize the institution while knowing the failings of the professional staff; they “live the mission” in terms of serving the clientele of the institution, and while they are viscerally identified with the institution, and make it run, they also have clearer boundaries between themselves and the institution.  On the weekend, they are just Mom or Dad – they aren’t attending some business function (though in this piece the assistants are all interested in becoming agents, so their lives are as consumed by the agency as the lives of their bosses).




The final agent is Arlette.  Arlette is lovely character.  She is the only surviving member of the original agency.  She was the other agent with Samuel Kerr when it opened.  Her clients are less high profile – and she is less involved in the squabbles between the up and comers.  She lends critical support to the other agents when the situation at the agency is dire – especially in the fourth season.  She seems almost an afterthought as a character, yet she (and her dog, who substitutes for not having an assistant), serves an essential role of being able to take the long view and to not be too stirred up by this crisis or that.  She is a woman who chose a career at a time when few women had that freedom, and she is proud of the life she has led, even if she does have a few regrets.  She also, I think, exemplifies the old fashioned French esthetic – living life as it should be lived – sipping the wine, finding it divine, and holding her secrets closely.

This show, like Schitt’s Creek and unlike Seinfeld, allows its characters to develop.  Each episode is focused on the escapades and foibles of one or two French Film Stars (playing themselves) and in one episode, an American Film Star.  This creates a sort of campy effect as we deal with the whims or neuroses of this character or that.  The issues of the treatment of women in the industry are addressed, though not particularly forcefully.  It is not really, I don’t think, about the film industry, or even about agents and their role in the industry.  It is more about life on the edge.  The ways that individuals who are too busy keeping their business from falling off a cliff to think about what the costs of doing that are – to the business, but most importantly to themselves.  There is a sense in this series – as in life – that a great deal of our lives simply flows through our fingers and we don’t quite have time to grasp it. 

That said, there is something about the campy way that it is presented.  Despite the high production value and the effort that goes into crafting both plot and character, there is a quality of – let’s get everyone together and put on a show.  Let’s hang up a curtain over a wire, bring in the other kids, and see if they like it.  There is an immediacy to the acting that makes it seem realistic – these are the people at my office, and occasionally they are doing the stupid, inane things that I do – and simultaneously it feels staged; is as if the actors are amateurs because surely trained professionals would not be as clumsy as you and me?

The French Stars (and the one American - in the penultimate episode) amplify the campiness.  First of all, they are not dolled up - including with plastic surgery.  They are real.  They have real gaps in their teeth.  Their hair can be a mess.  And they make fun of themselves.  They amplify (or create?) their neuroses and exaggerate their narcissism (is that even possible for a movie star to do?). 

The series, then, has felt both mildly unsettling (my dreams have included more than a little franglais being used to explain some inexplicable mess in my life) and oddly validating.  It is not because I am living in a flyover state that voted for Trump (what were these people thinking?) that I feel like my life is being lived on the edge – life is lived on the edge, particularly by those of us who care enough about what we are doing to invest ourselves – and therefore all of our shortcomings, our egotistical stuff, and the unknown parts of ourselves – in the work that we do.   We are fighting with each other over scraps.  We care, to varying degrees, about the institution, about ourselves, and about those we work with and for (both our bosses and the people that we serve).  And all of these things are constantly in a fluid dance of priority – and often take up much more space in our days and in our thoughts than do our families…  As Andrea points out, she will dash across town to get just the right shoe for one of her clients to wear on an evening out, but she often doesn’t put the same effort into getting home on time to be with her daughter.

Often at this point in a post I would talk about the plot of the entire sequence as a means of illustrating this or that psychoanalytic point.  Here I would like to present the series to you as an opportunity to experience what it is like to be an analyst.  We don’t know, from moment to moment, what will happen.  We don’t know what will emerge to upset the apple cart once things have just started to feel stable, nor do we know what stabilizing force will emerge when we are just about convinced that everything is going to fall apart.  The roller coaster ride is the analytic experience.

I have already compared aspects of this show to my own life.  My thesis is that you will find this to resonate with yours.  In the spirit of that, I invite you to reflect on the madness that is in this series – and to see how it parallels – or doesn’t – the madness that is part and parcel of living the very modern (or postmodern) life that we are living (even when we aren't on COVID lockdown)…



Post Script:  On reflecting after posting about this, there is one other thing that I would like to call your attention to.  While all of the actors are reasonably attractive, they don't, with the possible exception of the man playing Mathias, have leading role movie star good looks.  They look like, and are playing, character parts.  Perhaps one of the differences between the French Dream - portrayed in their films and now TV - and the American Dream - portrayed in our Movies and TV - is that the French dream of themselves more as they are, while we dream of ourselves more as we would like to believe we are.  Don't get me wrong, one of the French actors is lured by the possibility of playing in a Bond film - we all want to be ideal versions of ourselves - but we Americans may not quite have gotten over the fact that we can't always be that.  Perhaps that is part of American exceptionalism.  And perhaps that keeps us from seeing just how limited we - and the institutions we create and belong to - are.  The French, after all, while sharing our love of liberty, have had to achieve it more recently, more bloodily, and don't have the geographical splendid isolation that we share with our British forbearers.  I am making too much of a single movie, but I think that we see the imprint of the culture on the individual - and certainly also on the films and television that the culture produces.  



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