66-5: what is the new original Canal + creation worth (review)?
The team behind Engrenages is reforming for a legal series. A story of female empowerment that comes up against stylistic blunders.
Anne Landois returns through the “Canal+ original creation” box. The one who orchestrated the intrigues of four seasons ofGears delivers a legal series with the scent of thriller, around a collective who made the golden age of the series with it: the producer Vassili Clertscreenwriter Simon Jablonka and the lawyer Clarisse Serrelawyer and ad hoc guarantor. 66-5 – which debuted this Monday evening on Canal + – is even freely inspired by the career of the latter as a lawyer who crossed the Paris ring road to practice in the suburbs.
On this basis, the showrunner, supported byAudrey Fouche (Ghosts), sketches the portrait of a criminal lawyer (Alice Isaac, which carries the series) forced to rethink her career and her existence when her husband is accused of rape. Retreating to the city of her childhood, she comes up against a past that she would have preferred to forget. Engrenages has always carried realism as its standard, 66-5 does nothing else. This bias has also, sometimes, given the encrypted channel’s reference cop show a certain rigidity. 66-5 seems determined to go out of its way by opting for a non-linear narrative based on flashbacks, and retraces the setbacks of its heroine or sketches her emancipation.
Except that between two temporalities, the series gets lost, abandons its point of view to emphasize the criminal story that it will have to untangle, forcing the fiction into forced contortions and twists and turns. Lovers ofGears will find the flagship markers that made its success, like a final farewell gift.
66-5, season 1 in 8 episodes, to be seen from Monday September 18 on Canal +.
