Monsieur Spade
You’re not in San Francisco anymore…
Lovers of Noir filmmaking will appreciate this gem of sepia tones and clever one-liners. It hits all the right marks and takes the Sam Spade character passed the caustic stereotype and into the breathtaking French countryside.
Does the environment change the man or the man the environment? It turns out the saying, ‘Once a spade, always a spade’ still rings true. Who would he be without his straight-man quips and unflinching truth? He is the rock the water circumvents, although he does very occasionally smile. Granted it’s generally at irony, but still, it is a smile.
What Bogart made famous Clive Owen perfects — Stoicism has a new, or rather revived poster boy. In short, he wears Sam Spade like an old suit that has been tailored and pressed, and made acceptable for the French, although his housekeeper would disagree.
By now you might have surmised that I am in love with this series, with Sam Spade, with the style, the countryside, the music, and the dialogue. Director Scott Frank effortlessly melds these elements together to create cinematic wonderment. Just as in his “Godless”, a series with a much different kind of scenery, Frank uses the same photographic sensitivity — the land speaks to us with its lush, and moody rain, and its subtle sunlight playing upon the vineyard.
In The Beginning…There was a Fedora!
Our story begins in the past with Sam Spade attempting to deliver a quiet and frightened little girl to her absentee father, a man who is more criminal and amoral than most. He proves difficult to find, and while some say that’s a blessing, Spade stays to see the assignment through. What proves to be an extra motivation is the alluring Gabrielle, a widow from the war (WWII) who happens to own an exquisite nearby estate and vineyards, and needs a private investigator of her own.
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Fast forward eight years and we find Spade at the estate and the little girl whose father he was tasked to find, Teresa, living at the local convent. Gabrielle has passed on and everyone has settled into a kind of comfortable, if unrequited life.
But the peace is disturbed by an unimaginable act and all are thrown into a chaotic scenario where everyone has their own motivations for the unscrupulous things they do.
One of the themes running through the story can be summed up by a writer who died before the end of WWII, F. Scott Fitzgerald, when he wrote, ‘There are many different kinds of love, but never the same love twice.’
Spade clings to the memory of his dead wife and the other characters, Marguarite and Jean-Pierre Deveraeux who own a local nightclub, and have a disputed right to a piece of land now belonging to Spade, hold fast to a marriage that is over. The British painter and his mother who rent nearby have a connection to the land: the father who painted the same land (and probably had an affair with Gabriella) in his youth and has since passed on. The enigmatic “father” of Teresa, Phillip Saint-Andre, and her mean-spirited “grandmother” must love something. It’s not Teresa, but it is something she’ll soon possess on her eighteenth birthday — her mother’s money.
The plot thickens when a Muslim boy who is considered to be a religious ‘sign’ by the Arab community is kidnapped and brought to the south of France, beginning a worldwide search for him involving the CIA, MI5, the Vatican, and more. Spade never languishes for things to do.
This multilayered, complex plot delivers all the answers we’re looking for in the end and some history as well. Being American, I’ve had little instruction in French history after World War II, and so France’s war in Algeria shortly after WWII comes as a lesson of what more can go wrong in the world. Jean-Pierre Deveraeux, Marguarite’s husband, pays the price of this war with his sanity and damaged relationships.
In fact, loss and recovery permeate the story from the world’s recovery from the devastating war to our characters’ own struggles to move on. And isn’t that the struggle for all of us in one way or another?
Your time is not wasted watching this series. All the performances are stunning, Clive Owen as Sam Spade, Cara Bessom as Teresa, and my personal favorite, if one can have just one favorite, Louise Bourgoin as the beautiful Marguarite, singer, club owner, general smart ass.
