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From France with fury
Odile Vuillemin and Jean Reno
conquer FoxCrime audiences |
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| 14/12/2012 |
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Once again in partnership with FoxCrime, the Festival dedicated its afternoons to mystery TV, with episodes of Awake, Season 7 of Dexter and Season 8 of Criminal Minds. But the true stars of this year’s edition were the two French series.
The first show, Profiling (Profilage), now in its fourth season, centers on Chloé Saint-Laurent, a criminologist who is as skilled in solving complex cases as she inept in managing her private life. The second series, Jo, stars celebrated French actor Jean Reno as Parisian crime squad officer Jo St-Clair.
The Festival had the pleasure of hosting, alongside FoxCrime Italia head Marco Rosi, two of the series’ key figures: Odile Vuillemin, who plays Chloé Saint-Laurent in Profiling, and René Balcer, the writer-producer writer of Jo and Law & Order, the latter for which he won an Emmy.
Airing on a channel that features mostly US television product, Profiling has been enormously successful for FoxCrime - it is, in fact, the broadcaster’s number two series. The secret to its great popularity is undeniably the way in the writers, and the woman who plays her, have created the character of Chloé. Says Vuillemin: 'She is a unique psycho-criminologist, a professional with a very messy private life, who’s better at dealing with the dead than the living. Personally, in real life, I’m much worse than Chloé, I possess her chaos but I’m not as imaginative or intelligent.”
The French actress added: “Since this is a crime series, it’s not easy to improvise because you have to stay within a rigid narrative structure, with clues that have to be given in specific moments, and complicated psychological monologues. In shaping her, I took inspiration from Andy Warhol’s pop, and I recreated a past for her, starting with her childhood. Seeing the character grow is one of my greatest satisfactions.”
Marco Rosi also spoke about Saint-Laurent’s substantial character arc: “Chloé evolves a great deal. She’s initially a bit hare-brained but over the course of the series her life changes radically, unlike other crime series in which we know hardly anything about the main characters, who remain almost identical throughout the seasons.”
In speaking on the genesis of Jo and the way in which he recreated the geography of Paris, René Balcer said: “The idea came from Jean Reno, he wanted to create a TV series for the international market. Many people think that Paris is the city of lights and love. I, on the other hand, think it’s a very gothic city, that inspires death. I didn’t want to present it as in a National Geographic documentary so, although there exist very recognizable locations, I wanted to set things in little-known places or present the known ones in an unconventional way. At the same time, I created a protagonist who reflects my idea of Paris.” |
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