Quick TV Rec: Lupin

The first episode of Lupin, Netflix’s French-language modernization of Maurice Leblanc’s turn of the century stories about the “gentleman burglar” Arsène Lupin, is something of a puzzle box. Assane Diop (Omar Sy), a janitor at the Louvre, gets in trouble with some loan sharks, and in lieu of payment, offers his inside knowledge to help them steal a fabulous necklace about to go on auction. It’s a slick heist story that nevertheless feels a little bit off. Assane’s plan has the hint of flop sweat about it. His accomplices are clearly too incompetent and impetuous to be part of a true heist team. That effortless Ocean’s 11 feel is missing, and it’s obvious that any minute things will go wrong.

Then the bottom comes out of the whole story and it reshapes itself, along the way revealing Assane’s true motivations and nature. It’s a sufficiently clever reveal, and handled with enough panache, that I’m tempted not to say any more about it or the show that contains it. If you’re willing to take my word for it, that Lupin is a clever and charming show that is more than worth your time (which it anyway doesn’t demand very much of; the first season is only five episodes long), you might want to stop reading here. If you’d like to know more, I’ll simply say that stealing the necklace turns out to have personal associations for Assane. It belonged to the Pellegrinis, the family for whom his father worked as a chauffeur, and in whose home Assane, a recent immigrant from Senegal, discovered the stories of Maurice Leblanc. When it disappeared twenty-five years ago, Assane’s father was blamed. He confessed to the crime and committed suicide in prison. Assane, disillusioned of his father’s ethos of honest hard labor, instead dedicated himself to his newfound literary hero. In the present, he is a conman and a master of disguise, who plots elaborate heists while remaining invisible to the authorities—and to the elite society from whom he steals.

The most obvious point of comparison for Lupin is Sherlock, Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’s modernization of the Sherlock Holmes stories which marked ten years since its debut last year. Like Sherlock, Lupin sets its stories in a modern, technologized metropolis, and yet repeatedly argues that these antiquated tales sit perfectly in this setting, not least because of how the class structure on which they rested still holds sway. Like Sherlock, Lupin mixes and matches elements of Leblanc’s stories, breathing new life into them by porting their elements to the 21st century. Like Sherlock, it luxuriates in gray, rain-washed cityscapes, made beautiful through the magic of HD and cinematic direction. I even caught a hint of Sherlock‘s signature, twanging harpsichord on the Lupin soundtrack.

For those of us who watched Sherlock collapse into itself like a neutron star, that’s a comparison that might be cause for some hesitancy when choosing whether to adopt a new series. But almost from the first minute, Lupin sets itself apart from Sherlock in a way that makes it clear that it understands its main character and his differences from his literary inspiration. Sherlock‘s protagonist bulldozed through obstacles through the sheer force of his arrogance, his cut-glass accent, and most of all, the inescapable impression of class that wafted off him. (On this last count, the show was truer to the original stories than in almost every other aspect of its adaptation.) Lupin takes the opposite approach. Assane may embrace the lifestyle and outlook of a gentleman burglar, but he achieves his aims by making himself accommodating and helpful. More importantly, by making himself the sort of person whom most people don’t look twice at—a janitor, a food delivery person, the guy from IT.

It’s impossible, of course, to disentangle race from this premise. Lupin acknowledges race, and the presence of racism in French society, only very occasionally throughout its first season. (Most notably, a scene in which Assane effortlessly puts an old woman at her ease—and cons her out of her jewelry—by reminiscing with her about the “good old days” of the French colonization of the Congo.) But the fact of both is nevertheless inescapable in the form of its title character. Sy is very tall, very dark-skinned, and very very handsome. For reasons both good and bad, he should turn heads wherever he goes. And yet Assane perfects the art of being invisible by creating the sense—in his marks, in his police pursuers, and just in random people on the street—that he is there to serve them, and can therefore be safely ignored. A running gag throughout the season, for example, is that when the police try to get witnesses to provide descriptions of the various roles Assane has played, the sketches come out so different that the higher ups won’t even believe that a single person is responsible for all these separate crimes.

Much of this comes down to an ingratiating smile and a solicitous attitude, the very tools that people of color have always used to evade white attention and hostility. Assane weaponizes them and turns them into key elements of his criminal toolbox. Like any thief in a heist story, he can put on a sharp suit and mingle with the hoi polloi (while taking advantage of their discomfort at the fact that someone who looks like him has apparently gained entrance to their circles). But he can also flip the script, as in the season’s third episode, in which he breaks into a prison to get a key piece of information, through the simple expedient of correctly deducing that the guards won’t notice when he swaps places with another dark-skinned black prisoner. It’s in this episode that Assane demonstrates another key trait that sets him apart from Sherlock, kindness and the willingness to listen. By sitting at the bedside of a dying prisoner and genuinely engaging with the man, he gains the next puzzle piece in his quest to unravel the cause of his father’s downfall, and get revenge on the Pellegrinis. As this and other moments throughout the season demonstrate, the first part of the “gentleman burglar” combo matters to Assane as much as the second, and his solicitousness towards those he sees as needing his protection or attention is a key component of his charm.

If I have any criticism, it’s that the show could use more characters for Assane to bounce off of. Lupin is very good at conveying the twists of its plots without resorting to having Assane explain them to us, and perhaps as a result of that, he has few confidants, and almost everyone he interacts with is part of some scheme and is interacting with a character, not the man himself. It feels like a waste of Sy’s charming, layered performance not to let him be himself with at least a few characters—all the more so given that the season’s strongest episode is the one in which he joins forces with a disgraced journalist who sees through his lies and forces him to come clean with her.

For the same reason, the show’s female characters—Assane’s ex Claire (Ludivine Sagnier) and Pellegrini daughter Juliette (Clotile Hesme)—could use a bit of fleshing out. Claire in particular has the rather thankless job of having to constantly bump up against the walls of lies and secrets that Assane has put up around himself, which eventually makes her feel rather tedious (and makes it hard to understand why Assane is clearly still hung up on her, beyond the fact that they share a child). But these are things that the show could develop in later seasons—the current run of episodes ends with what feels like a big leveling up moment, as one of Assane’s police pursuers finally catches up to him. And in the meantime, Lupin is effortlessly enjoyable, and incredibly smart in how it reimagines its source material for the 21st century.