"Totems", classy and ambitious fresco of French espionage

• The first three episodes of the French series

  Totems

  are available this Friday on Amazon Prime Video.

• This ambitious spy fresco against a backdrop of the Cold War follows Niels Schneider in the shoes of a space engineer recruited by the SDECE (the ancestor of the DGSE).

• A game of pretense skillfully mixing geopolitics and intimacy, sublimated by a polished and ultra-referenced staging.

A classy and ambitious fresco of French espionage against the backdrop of the Cold War! 

, a series in eight episodes created and written by Juliette Soubrier (

) and Olivier Dujols (

) and whose first three episodes will be posted this Friday on Amazon Prime Video, follows the adventures of Francis Mareuil (Niels Schneider), a scientist who will be recruited as a spy by the secret services of General De Gaulle.

A game of pretense skillfully mixing geopolitics and intimacy, sublimated by a polished and ultra-referenced staging.

The hero, Francis Mareuil, is a space engineer at CNES.

“At that time, France was the third space power.

There were English and Italian satellites before having French satellites, but they used Russian or American launchers.

In November 1965, the French launched the first French satellite with a 100% French launcher.

For the record, his name was Asterix, ”recalls Olivier Dujols, whom

met at the last Canneseries festival where the

series was presented in official competition.

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A spy fresco against a backdrop of space conquest

The engineer is mandated by his godfather, Charles Contignet, a recruiter for the French secret services (Lambert Wilson), who works for the secret services of the SDECE (the ancestor of the DGSE) to approach, during a congress in Berlin, a Russian scientist likely to move west.

“At the time of the Cold War, what interested the Soviets and the Americans was to develop technologies to fuck each other in the face.

However, between a missile with a nuclear warhead, and a launcher which will put a satellite in space, there is not a huge difference”, comments the screenwriter.

And to add: "Space is not the subject, it is a background that provides a framework", that of a decade when John F. Kennedy promised the Americans that Man would walk on the Moon.

Francis Mareuil leaves Paris, his wife Anne (Ana Girardot), a childhood love whom he married out of obligation and his son, to fly to Berlin.

On the spot, galvanized by his beginnings in espionage, the engineer does not take long to succumb to the charm of the daughter of the Russian scientist, Lyudmila Goloubeva (Vera Kolesnikova), a pianist prodigy forced to collaborate with the KGB.

On site, Francis can count on the help of Virgile (José Garcia), a French spy marked by the trauma of a life spent under a false identity.

A cold war story with a romantic backdrop

“Francis only lives for his dream, the net space totally misses part of his life.

It is no longer passion with his wife Anne and he does not share much with his child.

He will be caught up in this completely crazy spy thing, which he initially refuses.

But it is also a promise of adventures that will reveal it, but it is also dangerous and destructive, ”analyzes its interpreter, Niels Schneider.

But how do you know if the feelings that seem to animate them are sincere or guided by political interests?

After

, Vera Kolesnikova finds the spy series again: “For me, it's more a love story than a spy story.

It's above all a story of choice,” says the Russian actress, who sees her character as a young woman who “had a French mother and for whom French culture is very important.

It was forbidden in the USSR… She feels like a foreigner.

»

A not Manichean geopolitical situation

The actress is delighted with the representation of the USSR in

 : “My father told me a lot of things and I read a lot on the subject.

It's complicated to write about the USSR: there was a lot of violence, lies, betrayals, but also a lot of beauty.

»

“With hindsight today, the strength of the series is in the representation of the Eastern and Western blocks.

Even if it is a period when we wanted to binarize the world and make things very Manichean, the series explodes this binary scheme and restores complexity, ”abounds Niels Schneider.

“It was a period in terms of ideology where there were a lot of open doors: you could be French and communist”, underlines Olivier Dujols.

According to him, the French secret services at the time “have a little ass between two chairs between the CIA, with which they are supposed to be allies, and the KGB, to which we nevertheless sometimes reach out.

»

A beginning of female emancipation

Anne, the wife of Francis (Ana Girardot), is at the heart of a second plot taking place in Paris.

"I didn't say 'yes' right away because I thought the character of Anne Mareuil was too confined to her role as a woman of the 1960s. Olivier Dujols and Jerôme Salle, the director, were very attentive to these requests and have made the character evolve to get her out of this condition, ”says Ana Girardot.

Her character makes it possible to show the condition of women in French society in the 1960s: bank withdrawals impossible without the agreement of the spouse, abortion is illegal and the contraceptive pill will only be authorized in December 1967 with the Neuwirth law. .

“Anne Mareuil is restrained by her education and the society in which she evolves.

Even if we want to show the condition of women in those years, I found that we could not leave her where she was, ”comments the actress.

Anne Mareuil will therefore begin to emancipate herself, to break the rules and gain a little independence.

“She works, which is modern at that time.

She is not a submissive woman.

She will find herself fairly quickly embroiled in the problem of espionage, there is also a conquest of her freedom, ”explains Olivier Dujols.

A neat recreation of the 1960s

From the famous DS to the Berlin Wall via gingham outfits,

offers a neat reconstruction of the 1960s and a staging that pays homage to the classic spy films of the time (Hitchcock, John Le Carré. ..).

"In terms of staging, Jérôme Salle, who set up the entire visual aesthetic of the series, has this taste for Hitchcock and all things 1960s," explains Olivier Dujols.

“We had access to a

, with all the codes of spy films from the 1960s and 1970s in it,” agrees Ana Girardot.

“There are a lot of things that we didn't allow ourselves, simply because at the time, the technology, both in terms of cameras and machinery, wouldn't have allowed it.

This gives a coherent side, since we are in 1965”, continues Olivier Dujols.

Totems

adopts a rather novel point of view on the Cold War.

"We are used to seeing Anglo-Saxon spy series... Seeing a French character in a series who plays with the codes of spy films, I find that brilliant", comments Niels Schneider.

Beyond the old-fashioned spy series with its double agents, its encrypted documents and its gadgets,

offers beautiful poetic flashes like this meeting of Francis and Ludmyla through a lunar globe.

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• lambert wilson

• ussr

• Spying

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