My thoughts about movies and TV shows I've been watching

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Wednesday, October 2, 2019

Impossible to overpraise the first season of the French series A French Village

It's hard to overpraise the terrific French series A French Village (creators: Emmanuel Daucé, Frédéric Krivine, Philippe Triboit), at least based on the first (of nine!) seasons: A completely engrossing and often frightening drama that brings us into a small and seemingly typical village in rural France, not far from the Swiss border, at the outset of the Occupation (1940) and presumably in subsequent seasons taking us through the course of the War and its aftermath. The series is exciting and provocative throughout, as just about every relationship that develops w/in the village and between the villagers and the occupying German forces is nuanced and troublesom. It's easy to set here on the outside 8 decades later and think we'd be active in the resistance and would give the Germans hell and would protect the Jewish residents - but would we? It was so easy to be quiet, to try to get along, to believe that cooperation w/ the Germans was a way to make life better (for some). We see it all: the resistance, the collaborators, the profiteers, the ordinary citizens, the careerists - up and down the whole social strata, but without melodrama or overstatement and with fine delineation of character and development of some of the central characters over the course of the season, some for better some for worse. The first season is entirely watchable, even without any special knowledge about the early years of the Occupation in France, and the series is of course especially disturbing now in the U.S. as we witness the rise of right-wing fascism and hatred with no sense of where it will lead this country over the next few years. Who will collaborate? Who has already?

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