At last: a beloved-TV-show-to-film-spinoff that doesn’t suck! The original French series is a screwball-speed office comedy about a boutique Parisian talent agency, and was a ratings and critical success in its homeland when it started back in 2015. Its acquisition by Netflix grew the audience internationally and spawned a stable full of remakes across Europe and Asia. In the meantime, several members of the original French cast have become proper stars in their own right, especially Camille Cottin and Laure Calamy, and this sequel, set five years on, is smart to put these two at the heart of the latest instalment. And of course, there are the obligatory turns from properly famous actors playing themselves, including Laetitia Casta, Vincent Macaigne, Laurent Lafitte and some guy named George Clooney, best known these days for appearances on vaporettos in the Venice lagoon.
Like many great sitcoms, this one always understood that failure, rather than success, keeps the wider narrative arc more interesting and relatable. So the last episode of the series left the gang at talent agency ASK (which stood for Agence Samuel Kerr, after the founder, who died in the first episode), dispersed to new gigs and careers; the band, in effect, broke up. Five years on, the stars have aligned to bring them all back together to work on Andréa (Cottin) and Noémie’s (Calamy) new film project, so the title Call My Agent! The Movie works on more than one level.
So now, silver fox smoothie Mathias (Thibault de Montalembert) is running a small agency with his daughter Camille (Fanny Sidney) while Mathias and his secretary-lover Noémie are finally officially together. Noémie, always a natural organiser, has become a producer with her own hit TV show that looks suspiciously just like Call My Agent! Thanks to complicated (and mostly backfiring) machinations on Mathias’s part, Noémie ends up producing their former colleague Andréa’s first feature as a writer-director.
Enter Casta and Macaigne as the leads of the film within the film, the latter represented by ASK alumnus Gabriel (Grégory Montel), who went off to be the token nice guy for a hateful all-business rival agency. Andréa has in the interim split up with her girlfriend and co-parent Colette (Ophélia Kolb), although that means we get a custody battle to add a bit of drama. Thankfully, everyone’s favourite comic reliefs, old salt Arlette (Liliane Rovère) and assistant turned actor Hervé (Nicolas Maury) are still in the ensemble – even if Arlette is somewhat underused until the last act.
Writers Fanny Herrero, Lison Daniel and Violaine Bellet, along with director Émilie Noblet, skilfully open the tap and let the stream of industry-insider jokes flow at an even pace but make sure that the final product never feels smug, sentimental or self-congratulatory. The energy flags a tad in the midsection, but by the time Andréa’s film starts shooting and a cascade of bad luck descends on the set to wreak havoc, the comedy hits its stride again. Formidable.
