- In Hunters , available since Friday on Amazon Prime Video, Al Pacino camps the leader of a group of Nazi hunter in Seventies America.
- The series, produced by Jordan Peele, is a pastiche of 1970s exploitation films and the golden age of comic books.
- Like Inglourious Basterds , Hunters recounts the revenge of the Jews against the backdrop of the Holocaust.
A mix of Spiderman and Marathon Man ! In Hunters , Al Pacino interprets with jubilation and a wobbly Yiddish accent his second role in a series, after the miniseries Angels in America on HBO in 2003. He camps Meyer Offerman, a survivor of Auschwitz, become the leader of a band Nazi trackers in America in the 1970s. This wealthy New Yorker, successively compared to "Bruce Wayne", aka Batman, or to "Professor X", the leader of the X-Men and his team of "Jew-per heroes "(Or" super-Jews "), as one of them says, plays the vigilantes in order to prevent the Nazis refugees in the United States from building the 4th Reich on American soil. Like Jojo Rabbit from Taika Waititi, a comedy about just Oscar-winning Nazi Germany (best adapted script), the series, produced by Jordan Peele and available since Friday on Amazon Prime Video, offers a curious mix of genres.
An ode to the golden age of comics books
Hunters begins as an original comic book story. Jonah Heidelbaum (Logan Lerman, Percy Jackson in films adapted from fantasy novels), sullen teenager like Peter Parker, lives with his grandmother, Ruth, a survivor of the death camps. In the middle of summer 1977, one night, she was murdered before her eyes. Jonah discovers that his "safta" was secretly working with Meyer Offerman, to eliminate a secret society bringing together Hitler's fanatics living in America.
If Meyer Offerman looks more famous and fictional vampire hunter Van Helsing as famous and real Nazi hunter Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, as highlighted a colleague Télérama, Hunters Nazi (Greg Austin, Dylan Baker and Lena Olin) look like more to the cartoons of the Nazisploitation films than to the many German scientists who found themselves in the United States after the Second World War thanks to the program kept secret until 1973, dubbed "Operation Paperclip". Hunters channels the spirit of the golden age of American comics. The superheroes were created by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, all children of immigrant Jewish families, to wage larger-than-life battles between the forces of Good and Evil. Captain America was born to fight the Nazis and Magneto, a Holocaust survivor, wants above all to avoid mutants from suffering a similar persecution. And in front of Hunters, it's impossible not to think of SHIELD against Hydra.
A "love letter to my grandmother"
Hunters is a story born in the imagination of a child, for whom the reality of the Shoah is inconceivable and unimaginable. Jonah Heidelbaum is a kind of cathartic Doppelgänger by David Weill, the creator of the show. " Hunters is a love letter to my grandmother," he said to a few handpicked journalists the day after the series premiere in London. “My grandmother, Sarah, was a Holocaust survivor. She told my brother and me about her experience. As a child, it felt like superhero stories. It was the only way for me, as a child, to understand these stories, ”he explains.
A tribute to 1970s cinema
Hunters is also a love letter to Seventies cinema. Al Pacino, quintessential New Hollywood, is the Godfather of this Baudrillard show. " Marathon Man , French Connection and all these great films shot in New York in the 1970s were sources of inspiration to develop the look of the series we wanted, combined with the pop colors of comic books," confirms the showrunner of Hunters , Nikki Toscano. Introducing spies like a Z-series movie trailer brings the viewer into the world of pastiche.
The team includes a bickering couple (Carol Kane, the heroine of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt whom Pacino met in 1975 on the set of A Dog's Afternoon and Saul Rubinek), a shady actor (Josh Radnor, LE Ted Mosby from HIMYM), a Vietnamese veterinarian master of martial arts (Louis Ozawa), a tough guy with Pam Grier (Tiffany Boone) and a nun ex-MI6 agent (Kate Mulvany). For them, killing Nazis is not just highly defensible, but terribly fun, regardless of FBI agent Jerrika Hinton (Grey's Anatomy), who is responsible for investigating their murders.
Even more than at Marvel, Hunters' style therefore holds grind house films, these rooms dedicated to bis cinema (Blaxploitation, Kung-fu, etc.). Hunters distills the same violence, enjoyable and stylized from Tarantino's films, and in particular from his obvious reference, Inglourious Basterds .
A duty of memory
Despite all its grotesquerie, Hunters clearly higher intentions and serious. David Weill feels invested with a duty of memory. "With the disappearance of the survivors, it is now our generation to tell these stories of our elders and to keep this truth alive," he says. "At each stage, David and I worked with specialists to ensure that the camps are represented in the most authentic way possible," says showrunner Nikki Toscano. The team took care, for example, that the numbers tattooed on the arms of the survivors did not match that of a real deportee. "In the flashbacks, all the violence that takes place in the camps is suggested, unlike that of 1977 which is shown," she underlines.
An SS officer who organizes chess games with human pawns, Jewish musicians playing Hava Naguila at the entrance to the Auschwitz camp… No doubt the flashbacks in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald camps or the ghetto of Warsaw will be the subject of much ink, since they represent scenes of fictitious atrocities (as if the atrocities actually committed by the Nazis were not enough?) And fictitious acts of resistance.
If the sequences in the camps adopt a more naturalistic style than in the rest of the series, Hunters does not register in the register of historical drama like the series Holocaust or the film The List of Schindler. It is not the first time that fiction takes liberties with the greatest tragedy of the XXth century and without entering into the inextricable critical debate on the representation of the Shoah initiated by Jacques Rivette in the article "From the abjection »Published in the Cahiers du cinema in 1961, the cruel reality is here twisted or transfigured, without ever being denied.
A cardiac delirium
Hunters puts on screen the fantasies of a child who, in order to endure the inexpressible, has constructed macabre tales, allegories of the immeasurable Nazi sadism, and stories of Jewish superheroes, allegories of power and justice returned to victims of the Holocaust. The series unfortunately never obtains with this perilous mixture of genres, the dramatic intensity and the cathartic dimension that it seems to aim for.
"You should read the Torah more. It's the original comic book "(" You should read the Torah more. It's the original comic book "), exclaims Meyer Offerman in the first episode. Like Jewsploitation films like Inglourious Basterds or Hebrew Hammer , the creation of David Weill is above all a pastiche that should not be taken too seriously. We will therefore revel in Hunters to hear an Al Pacino cartoonist shouting "Let's get to cooking these Nazi cunts! ("Let's go cook those Nazi assholes!")
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