Back to life
For the past few seasons, the world looked to Scandinavia for smart subtitled imports. From Denmark came the beloved crime dramas The Killing, Borgen and Those Who Kill. There, too, was The Bridge, a joint Swedish-Danish production made remarkable by its ambitious storyline. (A villain, who calls himself the “Truth Terrorist,” claims to commit felonies to draw attention to various social problems.) But for those who want something other than Nordic noir, the French have a television series that is just as dark and equally as compelling.
The Returned is set in a small mountain town where four years earlier, a coach transporting local teenagers on a school trip plunges down an Alpine precipice, killing everyone on board. As members of a bereavement support group debate on arrangements for a memorial, a seemingly random group of individuals starts making its way home, bewildered and almost as they were before, but not quite. The ghosts, presumably, of others who perished in the same lakeside area soon follow, adding to the eeriness.
SUPERNATURAL SPECTACLES
Based on the 2004 film Les Revenants, the eight-part Canal+ thriller seems to tread the same path as other supernatural spectacles such as the BBC’s In The Flesh and ABC’s Resurrection. While people have been dying on the small screen for years, The Returned manages to subvert stock zombie tropes to create a program unlike any other.
The French are such masters of brooding, minimalist acting that even their zombies smolder with blasé sexiness. Producer Caroline Benjo and writer-director Fabrice Gobert handle horror with both maturity and imagination, turning something as clichéd as flesh-eaters into something more cinematic and mesmerizing. In true Gallic fashion, the show features twin sisters who experience each other’s orgasms, even if one is now technically four years older than the other.
“In France we don’t have a lot of fantasy movies,” says Gobert in an interview with Channel 4, which broadcasts The Returned in the UK. “It’s difficult to imagine zombies in Annecy, so I imagine people who are dead, but who don’t look dead. So we tried modestly to invent something new, to adapt to France and to a French audience.” With music by the Scottish post-rock band Mogwai and an absence of anything particularly flashy on camera, The Returned bears more in common with Twin Peaks, which made a big impression on Gobert, than it does with The Walking Dead.
REAL MYSTERY
The Returned examines questions of faith and grief, of very real emotional issues to which the loss of someone dear gives rise. It’s these subtler undercurrents that make the show less camp and more philosophical, almost like a treatise on loss and change. After all, what if the worst you could imagine wasn’t having a loved one perish, but him or her coming back to life? Watching the characters in The Returned interact with family members who are still mourning their loss is simply heartrending.
Last year The Returned, shown on Sundance TV, was conferred a Peabody Award for “its intricate storytelling, its visual elegance and its rumination on life, death and what might lie between.” Cable network A&E is set to remake the miniseries for American audiences, with Jeremy Sisto, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Mark Pellegrino and Michelle Forbes in the cast and electronic producer Nicolas Jaar composing the music.
The original miniseries is so provocative, however, precisely because it is French. Adapting it would only muddle its charm. Pierre Perrier, who plays The Returned’s anxious, back-from-the-dead young groom, Simon, told Den of Geek: “For me, I think the success is because it represents a new French identity. France hasn’t been able until the last two or three years to make good TV shows, that it can export abroad. We make a lot of TV shows but nobody wants to see French TV. I mean, did you ever want to watch French TV before The Returned?”
Why we have to wait until late 2015 for the second season of this Francophone hit, it seems, is the real mystery.
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