While various international remakes have tried, nothing ever quite recaptured the brilliance of Call My Agent!. The original French TV series is a meta comedy-drama about celebrity agents for European film stars where actors like Isabelle Huppert, Jean Reno and Sigourney Weaver played themselves, so it could have easily descended into smug navel-gazing. But, instead, it was glossy, absurd, funny and endlessly inventive.
Over four series between 2015 and 2020, we journeyed with the agents of ASK (Agence Samuel Kerr) as they battled for clients, stabbed each other in the back and debased themselves in the vain hope that maybe, somehow, they’d contribute to creating something beautiful — or at least, get a good commission off the top. There was always some new crisis – a new owner, a dead owner, lost clients, internal scandal – and inevitably, the ASK team would create more chaos trying to solve their problems. Until, one day, they couldn’t any more. The firm was dissolved and they went their separate ways.
But now a new feature-length special gets the team back together, and it’s like they’ve never been away. In the years since ASK disbanded, Andréa (Camille Cottin) has changed careers to become a director, no longer speaks to best pal Gabriel (Grégory Montel) and is at odds with former rival Matthias (Thibault de Montalembert). Hervé’s acting career has stalled, industry legend Arlette (Liliane Rovère) has retired, while assistant-turned-‘Productrix’ Noemie (Laure Calamy) is flourishing with a gaudy, populist TV comedy.
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But Andréa’s first film is in chaos. One actor drops out, another has her nose broken, a wild boar won’t follow the script and chaotic weather delays shooting. She’s over budget, out of time and out of options. Cue reuniting the old gang for “one last job,” saving Andréa’s movie the only way they know how – lying, manipulating and taking ridiculous risks for their clients.
This film retains the show’s wit and warmth, and recaptures its farcical, frantic spirit. Crucially, it also upholds the series’s tradition of having major French stars playing boorish, self-absorbed parodies of themselves, as if they were in a chicer version of Ricky Gervais’s Extras. Though as a British viewer, one sometimes had to trust the series’s designation of fame for less familiar French actors – “Oh no, if we lose the very well-known Georgés de Montgomerie, we may have to shut down the entire agency!” – now we buy it because the characters buy it.
This time, Andréa’s main cast are real-life actors Laurent Lafitte, Laetitia Casta and Vincent Macaigne, though there are also starrier cameos – Eva Longoria pops up for a scene, as does George Clooney, playing himself as a remarkably thin-skinned prankster briefly courted for a role in Andréa’s film.
Camille Cottin holds her own at the centre of the storm as the increasingly tortured Andréa, but it’s Laure Calamy who steals the show as Noémie. Once the butt of the joke in the TV series – a scheming assistant in love with her boss – she’s now the beating heart of this film, a bundle of chaos trying to keep the cameras rolling even as she’s wrong-footed by bad luck (often literally – she falls flat on her face or back at least three times).
That said, not everyone gets as much time to shine. A two-hour film doesn’t offer the same space for an ensemble cast as a six-part series, and some of the ASK team draw the short straw. The likes of Camille and Hervé don’t get much to do, while Matthias’s emotional journey – from industry shark to slightly less cruel shark – feels like a rehash from the TV show’s finale. And Arlette’s contribution, while moving, only comes into play towards the end of the film, which ends abruptly when it feels like there’s more story to tell.
Still, overall, it’s a triumph and hopefully this won’t be the last time we tread the red carpet with the former ASK-ers. Surely there’s another disaster of a movie project they could get sucked into. After all, times may change, stars may flare and fade, but there will always be some insufferable new actor needing to be navigated through their latest project. C’est la vie.
Call My Agent! The Movie is available on Netflix on 10 September.
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