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Television - A French thriller brings style to a US series' gritty substance
Spiral (BBC4)
The Kiefer Sutherland thriller 24, now in its fifth series (Sky 1) and showing no signs of slowing down, is to spin off into a movie that will be shot, according to Sutherland, in London. Apart from the difficulty of a 24 film actually lasting 24 hours (maybe the producers will compromise and make it two hours and 40 minutes), the news is a cause for celebration for those tiring of the movie-land convention that every attack on the west must centre on Hollywood. The fear for Londoners is that credibility will be strained in the way it was in Basic Instinct 2, in which a car chase (chase! Try crawl) along the Embankment ended with a splashdown in the Thames.
Anyhow, I now have a better idea: relocate 24 to Paris. I am only saying this because I have fallen in love with Spiral, an eight-part thriller that BBC4 has had the guts to import from French television and show in prime time (Sundays, 9pm) with subtitles. It is actually nearer Britain's State of Play and America's Law and Order than 24 - it is about personalities, not gadgets - but it is as assured as 24, has its knack of entwining disparate-seeming plots, and looks, with its blue-chrome tint, just as stylish. What it lacks in high-tech interiors it makes up for with Parisian exteriors. By French television standards it is also filmed distinctly groovily, with the camera hurtling through windows, along corridors and into the heart of the action.
The story starts with a body. Well, they always do, don't they? And the body has been badly mutilated, which is la mode, too. The French hobby of philosophis-ing, however, lends the autopsy scenes a different flavour. Twice we are told that the dead woman must have been very beautiful, for only this would explain the ferocity of the posthumous assault on her face. As the cast of lawyers and cops are strikingly beautiful, the viewer immediately has cause to fear for their safety. The pathologist carefully removes the cloth that has covered the remains of the victim's face. It may work, he says, to identify her: like the Turin Shroud in reverse.
At this point Gilou (Thierry Godard), the least prepossessing of the policemen, faints, unimpressing his gamine young boss Laure Berthaud (Caroline Proust) no end. Gilou is the first clue we get that Spiral (or Engrenages, to give the series its French title) is going to be a dramatic investigation into not only a sick society but a sick judicial system. Gilou has got too close to his tarty Romanian informant - as in sleeping with her and taking her cocaine. Later he misses a vital clue because he is snorting a line at the very moment a suspect leaves an apartment he is supposed to be watching.
The court system is none too healthy, either. We see a famous lawyer collapse and die of a heart attack just as he is about to begin his defence speech. His case, he has admitted, is hopeless, but his deputy can hardly conceal her excitement at the prospect of reading his arguments and pretending to choke with emotion as she does so. "His last case, a dead man pleading against you, you've no chance," she tells her opposite number. "You're a cynic," he says, which doesn't quite cover it.
We are soon exploring the dead woman's life. Elena was a Romanian immigrant but was not, as the most misogynist of the prosecutors immediately assumes, a prostitute. (It would be impossible to pull off the line "She fits the profile: pretty, blonde, well proportioned, well groomed" in Britain, where we specialise in prostitutes who are less rather than more attractive than our wives.) In fact, she was a PhD biology student who liked to read Balzac and lived beyond her obvious means. She was also, it turns out in the concluding bombshell of episode one, known to Benoît, a rich guy who is a friend of the handsome new state prosecutor Pierre Clément, played by Grégory Fitoussi. We can be sure that Elena was not killed for her looks. More likely her murder was down to her work in a "lab that makes medicines", and The Establishment.
At this point, I should confess that the dissimilarity between the French judicial system and our own didn't make it any easier to negotiate the plot. The judges all seemed to be John Deeds, and the cops all seemed to be lawyers. I rather wished the programme had been preceded with an equivalent of the voice-over at the start of Law and Order: "In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups," and so on. But it wasn't.
What I enjoyed most - and this was Spiral's touch of genius - was the inclusion of a completely nutty sub-plot about a teacher who brought a puppet of a witch into the classroom and was facing claims that she beat up her pupils. Mme Sauvanet seemed completely innocent, but ended up in the mental asylum anyway. And I didn't like the way her lips twitched. So there is the integration of her story to look out for, the solution to Elena's murder, and the question of whether the two best-looking members of the cast, Fitoussi and Proust, will get a sex scene to themselves. As I say, I think I'm in amour.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times
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