La Rochelle (AFP)
From the fire of the "Bazaar of charity" on TF1 to the murder of "Laëtitia" on France 3, the true stories inspire the authors of TV dramas who seize them with audacity.
TF1 has produced with Netflix a series in costumes with big budget which is based on the terrible fire of the Bazaar of charity. On May 4, 1897 in Paris, the building housing this charity event was destroyed by a terrible fire, killing 125 people, almost all women.
The fire of the Bazaar, a "digest of the time", will trigger a "huge controversy", accusing the men especially for having fled, says the historian Bruno Fuligni in a book to appear on the drama, and a exhibition at the Halles de Paris.
The fire seen as a divine signal will also provoke a debate in the Chamber of Deputies, "which announces those of 1901 and 1905, with a break between an anticlerical France and a very religious France," says the author.
After a first episode, the TF1 series of course follows the investigation of the fire but focuses mainly on the change of life of three heroines survivors. Audrey Fleurot, Camille Lou and Julie de Bona play a great bourgeois, a penniless nobleman and a maid who are all three to take their independence.
- "Resound with today" -
"The watchword was resonating today, making a costume drama a contemporary fiction," said producer Iris Bucher, at a press conference at the La Fiction TV Festival. Rochelle.
The series in eight episodes, with its modernized aesthetic and language, has a "potential among the female audience, a target particularly sought after by TF1," said the producer. With her plans of Haussmann Paris, she will also be able to reach a global audience with her broadcast on Netflix.
M6 has presented for its part a new free adaptation of the case of Dupont Ligonnès: Arnaud Ducret interprets in the mini-series "An ordinary man", scheduled for 2020, a man who kills his entire family and disappears, with re-enactments who want to be faithful. But the channel added an element of fiction, rather poorly received by the public, with a hacker who conducts the investigation in parallel with the police.
In the first "docu-fiction" proposed by M6 on this case in December 2018, the murderer ended up committing suicide. While in "The share of suspicion" (broadcast on September 23 on TF1), Kad Merad plays a man who has (perhaps) resumed his life after murdering his entire family, and that an investigator comes to hunt.
"The news stories tell stories, lives, a state of society," says Ivan Jablonka, author of the investigative book "Laetitia", on the murder of a young woman in Pornic in 2011.
"When the public is interested in a news item, I do not think that it is not for the taste of the little excruciating fact, it argues.Beyond, there is the feeling that the news story tells us something about us. ".
To adapt the book in series for France 3, the director Jean-Xavier de Lestrade had to move away from this meticulous investigation and "simplify" passages. But "always with the concern to keep the complexity of the characters", and not to betray the memory of the young woman and his entourage.
The series "inspired by real events" can also propose a catharsis: less than five years after the attacks in Paris, France Televisions will present online an interactive and immersive series called "Republic", where several young Parisians find themselves facing an attack .
© 2019 AFP