One of the Most Delightful Shows of the 2010s Is Finally Back With a New Movie. C’est Très Bon.

Movies The Call My Agent! Movie Is a Delight, Even if You Didn’t Watch the Show One of the most delightful series of the 2010s is finally back, and this time it’s un film. By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Dana Stevens? Sept 10, 202610:00 AM Christophe Brachet/Netflix Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. The arrival of a straight-to-Netflix movie based on a TV show that ended five years ago might seem like a less-than-festive occasion, another example of the entertainment industry’s grim determination to milk every piece of successful IP down to the last flavorless drop. But for fans of the French comedy series Call My Agent!, which ran for four effervescent seasons before coming to a confusingly abrupt halt, Call My Agent! The Movie comes as a long-awaited chance to find out what happened to the show’s characters, the frazzled staff of a Paris-based talent agency. Call My Agent! was a show-business satire of a sort. It poked endless fun at its petty, conniving, yet lovable main characters, and in a running conceit, every episode featured a real-life movie star playing him or herself. These were not cameos but central roles as the problem client of the week, the one whose whims or neuroses threatened to scotch their projects with the agency. This sent the stars’ agents scurrying to placate, dissuade, chasten, or threaten them as needed, even as those agents squabbled and backstabbed among themselves, all while Frenchly having affairs in the workplace and everywhere else. For all its tart humor and eye for human weakness, Call My Agent! believed deep down in the power of a good movie. Most of the show’s ongoing conflicts had to do with the tug-of-war between art and commerce, between integrity (however comically misunderstood) and greed (however self-delusionally denied). The ASK agency, an independent shop that is eventually absorbed by a corporate giant, was easy to side with, despite its dysfunction. The work the agents did—shepherding ambitious projects to completion, protecting artists from exploitation or from their own worst impulses—was at heart worthwhile. My theory as to why Call My Agent! took off during the pandemic, when it had been streaming on Netflix since 2016, is that the show’s vision of a stressful yet glamorous workplace was frothy enough to make for fun viewing, while being emotionally satisfying enough to provide some of the productive interpersonal tension we were all missing. In the years since Call My Agent! ended, there has been confusion about whether a fifth season, a movie, or both were in development, and the existence of this feature-length installment does not preclude the possibility that an episodic reboot is still in the works. Creator Fanny Herrero, who wrote or co-wrote every episode until she exited the show at the end of the third season, makes a welcome return as co-screenwriter (with Lison Daniel), while Émilie Noblet directs. All the show’s main characters are back: Andréa (Camille Cottin) is now a would-be indie director trying to cast and finance her first movie. Andréa’s former best friend and colleague Gabriel (Grégory Montel) is now an agent at StarMédia, the soulless conglomerate that was ASK’s longtime rival before taking them over. Noémie (Laure Calamy), who started her career as the executive assistant to senior agent Mathias (Thibault de Montalembert), is now his dissatisfied live-in girlfriend and the producer of a successful but vapid reality show. Meanwhile, Mathias has launched his own talent agency with his illegitimate daughter Camille (Fanny Sidney), who is still angry about her father hiding her existence from his other family for two decades. (It’s a Season 1 thing.) Since this movie is about twice the length of a Call My Agent! episode, it’s fitting that there are not one but two guest stars playing themselves: Vincent Macaigne, an actor, theater director, and playwright, spoofs his own hyper-sincere persona as a tortured artist whose guilt over his unearned privilege is sabotaging his ability to work. Laetitia Casta also plays a slightly tweaked version of herself, a model turned actress whose past romance with Vincent remains unresolved. (In real life Casta recently divorced her high-profile husband, the actor and filmmaker Louis Garrel.) When the lead actor in Andréa’s debut film (Laurent Lafitte) deserts the project to take a supporting role in a Wes Anderson movie (sadly, that director does not appear as his corduroy-clad self), she has an ill-fated meeting with George Clooney (who does play himself, with wry humor). Eventually Andréa winds up casting Vincent in the lead despite her doubts as to his emotional stability. Similarly unwise is her choice to bring Noémie on as producer, given their clashing personality styles: The dryly understated Andréa dreams of artistic seriousness, while the bubbly, volatile Noémie has a keen business sense but tastes that run to the conventional. As Andréa’s independently financed film threatens to fall apart in every way imaginable, from the delay caused by an on-set injury to the intractability of a wild boar who arrives on set with a handler and agent of her own, the former staff of ASK begins to reconstitute itself around the project, unsettled grievances and all. Gabriel represents one of the two leads, Camille represents the other, and Mathias, at a low point in his personal and professional life, represents the boar. When things get really tough, Andréa puts in a call to her mentor Arlette (Liliane Rovère), a retired agent with the wisdom of a hardened old-timer. And Hervé (Nicolas Maury), a junior agent who left ASK to try for a career as an actor, does his best to bring Daniel Day-Lewis–style authenticity to his one-line part as a boar hunter in the film within a film. Like the series, Call My Agent! The Movie owes more to the tradition of French boulevard comedy than it does to the American sitcom, with crisscrossing romantic intrigues and farcical slamming doors. The laughs come less from the dialogue—though that is spiky, overlapping, and rapid-fire, worth experiencing in the subtitled rather than the dubbed version—than from the gradual pileup of bad luck and even worse decisions on the characters’ parts. For all the film’s charm, its final conflict gets resolved a tad too easily; after making choices that placed her cast and crew in legitimate danger, Andréa is forgiven pretty hastily by both her colleagues and the screenplay. It would be overpraising the movie to say that it aims for or accomplishes anything beyond what the average episode of the series did, but given the height of the bar the show set, that’s not nothing. Do you have to have seen Call My Agent! The Series to enjoy The Movie? No, but in all honesty, it would surely enrich the experience. Some of the film’s character arcs, especially the broken friendship between Andréa and Gabriel, would feel thin without knowing the characters’ long history as workmates and rivals. But watching your way through all four of this show’s six-episode seasons would feel less like homework than like getting 24 consecutive deliveries of perfectly baked Parisian pastry, each with a different-flavored filling. If you haven’t yet given yourself the pleasure, régalez-vous. Comedy France Netflix