The talent agents in the French comedy “Call My Agent!” stand out from their fictional brethren: They care.
“You must accept making a little less money to make a good movie,” one of them shockingly says in the opener of Season 4. She means it, too.
Crazy, right? It’s not the kind of line we would expect from one of the crass, venal middlemen Hollywood tends to enjoy portraying.
On paper, “Call My Agent!,” whose fourth and final season drops Thursday on Netflix, is yet another entry in the well-stocked category of self-referential showbiz series that find humor in watching real-life stars play exaggerated versions of themselves. “The Larry Sanders Show,” “Entourage,” “Extras,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and “Episodes” trod similar winking meta-terrain.
What makes the French show different is less that it takes place in a Paris so evocatively picturesque that you keep expecting Audrey Hepburn to pop out underneath the Eiffel Tower. And it’s less about the impressive guest stars, even though it doesn’t hurt that they include Juliette Binoche, Isabelle Adjani, Monica Bellucci, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Jean Dujardin and Isabelle Huppert.
Where “Call My Agent!” drastically departs from its American and British counterparts is that the employees of the fictional agency at its center, ASK, have good intentions and genuinely love the art they help create.
Throughout the years, we have watched ASK’s senior agents — Andréa (the breakout star Camille Cottin), Arlette (Liliane Rovère), Gabriel (Grégory Montel) and Mathias (Thibault de Montalembert) — act as managers, fixers, matchmakers, babysitters and shrinks for their clients. They’re on call at all hours to keep actors, producers and directors happy, and to ensure that they work in the best conditions possible.
Of course, they are trying to earn their paycheck — the original title, “Dix pour cent,” or “Ten percent,” refers to their commission — but there is always a sense they want an honorable result. They actually enjoy going to the movies, and at one point we see Andréa grab a copy of the highbrow film magazine “Positif.”
Similarly, the agents’ assistants, Hervé (Nicolas Maury), Noémie (Laure Calamy) and Camille (Fanny Sidney), may be shrewd, but they steadfastly support one another, their bosses and the clients. Whenever there is back-stabbing — everybody’s human — there tends to be a good reason, as when Gabriel commits a betrayal out of love in Season 4.
Certainly the job is not easy, especially in the new season, when ASK finds itself in deep financial trouble — which is odd considering the company seems to have half of the French screen industry on its roster, but never mind. The newly promoted Andréa must make tough decisions, all while managing her frustrated partner and their toddler. Still she can’t bring herself to cut moral corners.
This is rather different from the way the profession is usually portrayed in the United States. Agents in American shows are often cartoonish, either wholly conniving (Bebe on “Frasier”) or wholly ridiculous (Estelle, Joey’s chain-smoking agent on “Friends”). Many fall somewhere in the power-hungry middle, like Jeremy Piven’s Ari Gold in “Entourage.”
Sure, a few jerky agents pop up here and there in the French show, and other industry people occasionally behave in reprehensible ways. But everybody usually turns out to have a hidden quality, maybe even two. Only the new Season 4 character Élise (Anne Marivin), from the rival agency Starmédia, does not appear to have any redeeming traits besides her ecologically friendly mode of transportation. Who knows, though: Had the series continued, we might have discovered a good side to Élise, too.
The narrative is not quite as innovative when it comes to the headline-grabbing stars: As in its English-language brethren, the celebrities in “Call My Agent!” tend be self-deprecating, albeit with a rare level of witty panache. Typical is the episode starring Binoche, from Season 2. Binoche has long been associated with a certain French elegance and intellectual sophistication. Making the most of the actress’s underused comic chops, “Call My Agent!” portrays her as clumsy and disheveled at the Cannes festival, speaking in English that’s considerably worse than it is in real life. Similarly, Bellucci, a sex symbol, complains she can’t get dates.
Other entries fully embrace an actor’s reputation, only to push it into absurd extremes. The ever-busy Huppert is shown juggling several projects at once, a happy workaholic who won’t choose between mainstream fare and intimate Korean films. Béatrice Dalle, known for her risk-taking and frankness, complains that directors expect her to get naked at the drop of a hat.
The excellent Season 4 opener milks Charlotte Gainsbourg’s real-life whisper-soft voice for laughs, and the episode easily ranks among the show’s funniest. (Several of the juicy anecdotes or ill-advised behavior assigned to guests actually did happen in real life, but to other stars.)
The prickly relationship between fame and art runs through the entire series. Two of the Season 4 guests, Franck Dubosc and Mimie Mathy, are hugely popular in France, in the series as in real-life. But their work is ignored by the critical establishment at best, derided at worst. The show offers two possible reactions. Dubosc shoots an art-house movie in hopes of rehabilitating his image. Mathy digs in her heels, flipping a figurative finger at the establishment that snubs her.
Some of the jokes work best when you know the context. In a Season 1 episode, the guests JoeyStarr and Julie Gayet go from mutual animosity to flirtation. When he asks, “Are you seeing anyone at the moment?,” everybody in France knew when the episode first aired that Gayet was the former President François Hollande’s real-life lover. (Hollande, who had a partner at the time, was caught secretly visiting Gayet by motorized scooter, a nutty episode that could have belonged on “Call My Agent!”)
Generally, though, the humor is not referential but character- and situation-based, which explains why it travels so well. The show has always deftly balanced observational wit, calamitous misunderstandings, physical slapstick and satire. This being France, farce is never far as well. Lies escalate. People desperately hide affairs from their partners — who may or may not be cheating as well. Hervé and Noémie are straight out of an 18th-century play by Marivaux, in which resourceful servants outwit their masters, and possibly replace them.
Through it all, “Call My Agent!” eschews an unappealing trait that plagues so many contemporary shows: cynicism.
“I’m not talking about money; I’m talking about dignity and loyalty,” Arlette tells Mathias in the first season. The series keeps that sentiment close to heart until the very end, no matter how unrealistic it might be, as if to say: If you’re going to believe in something, it might as well be the show, not the business.
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