Tapie: the end of the series explained

The two creators reveal their vision and why the series ended in 1997: “It seemed a good place to end the saga of a man who was both victim and culprit.”

After the rise, the fall. Series Tapie recounts the heyday of the singer turned businessman turned minister turned president of OM. But she also recounts her descent into hell… Warning spoilers!

This inexorable fall begins with his humiliating ousting from the political world, unceremoniously thanked by Mitterand and his Government after only a few months at the Ministry of the City. Some time later, after winning the Champions League, Bernard Tapie was caught up in the OM-VA affair and in a masterful finale, in the form of a stifling closed session, in the narrow confines of the office of investigating judge Éric of Montgolfier, it will sink. The judge is not going to do him any favors. He will not allow himself to be corrupted or manipulated. And he’s going to send him behind bars, in a cold and methodical manner. Series Tapie thus ended up, in 1997, in La Santé prison.

“From the start, we knew we wanted to end on this“, reveal Tristan Séguéla And Olivier Demangel at Première. The two creators of the Netflix series explain their vision to us:

“For us, Tapie, it is the story of a prole who extracts himself from his condition and who is finally brought back to his initial condition. The story of Bernard Tapie is a bit of a story of class struggle. We could have told what he experienced afterwards – that’s interesting too – but it would have been something completely different. From the point of view of the parable, of the moral vision we had of the character, it seemed to us a good place to close the saga of a man who was both victim and guilty.

And Laurent Lafitte to increase: “What’s great about this scene is that he pulls out all his weapons! The trickery, the charm, the threat, the pathos… He arrived in his usual dynamic, in mode: I’m going to eat him , this little official, I’m going to return him and then it will be settled. Well no, not at all!”

Tristan Séguéla And Olivier Demangel also tell us why they chose not to show the trial which will ensue in reality, but to remain on this scene, in the office of Éric de Montgolfier, which puts an end to the rise of Tapie in a single evening and a hyper-dramatic confrontation:

“We have a being who is constantly standing, moving forward. But there, at this moment, this judge forces him to sit down. Then, Éric de Montgolfier puts the lamp in his face, which is true . This really happened. By doing this, he wanted to put him, already, in the position of the accused. Besides, this scene is quite close to what happened in reality. Their exchange lasted about forty minutes, at the end of the day. He arrived in this office in Valencienne to put pressure on him. And he came across stronger than him, this incarnation of high society and a form of aristocracy against which he had always triumphed in the past.”

Tristan Séguéla tells us that he was then inspired by the book Crimes and Punishments of Dostoyevsky, “where there is this same kind of scene: Raskolnikov arrives very loudly in the judge’s office and leaves on the verge of confessing. So, I isolated this scene from the script, I wrote it separately, a bit like a play. We have a Tapie in full power, just married, almost mayor of Marseille and who is aiming for the Presidency of the Republic. No one knows where he’s going anymore… And this scene of dialogue actually allows us not to recount the trial: when he leaves this office, it’s already over.”

Tapiecurrently watching on Netflix.