We love a good period mystery as much as the next person, with characters in elegant costumes from the 1920s or 1930s and many suspects that have motive and oppotunity to kill the victim. But in Summer ’36, a new French mystery on Netflix, what could have been a good mystery is larded down by too many characters and a web of side stories that detract from the central story.
SUMMER ’36: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: People enjoying a night out in a festive courtyard in Nice, on the French Riviera. “August 8, 1936.”
The Gist: It’s the first summer that France’s working class gets paid vacation time, and they’re mixing and mingling with the elite in the city that’s nicknamed “Côte d’Azur.” Four women, however, aren’t quite as happy as the rest of the crowd. At the swanky Riviera resort hotel, a maid approaches the room of prosecutor Adrien Jacquart (Arnaud Binard) and screams when she sees blood pooling outside the door. Inside, Jacquart is dead, a large gash in his throat.
Twenty hours earlier, an influx of tourists, both wealthy and working class, walks along the waterfront. Among them is the family of unionized factory worker Eugénie Berthier (Sofia Essaïdi), including her husband Jean (Simon Ehrlacher) and teenage son Louis (Jean-Baptiste Blanc). Jacquart, making his way to the Riviera, stops and helps Louis with his bicycle, struck by how much Louis looks like him.
In the meantime, Léonie Morel (Constance Gay) visits the prison where her father, Pierre Farget (Alain Cauchi) is on death row for a murder he did not commit; he tells Léonie that he’ll be executed in three weeks. She just got a job as a police assistant, and she hopes to get Jacquart to reopen the case.
Business magnate Henri Pontavice-Caron (Sam Karmann) arrives at the hotel, along with his daughter, Blanche Ackerman (Julie de Bona). Henri, who is ill, summons Eugénie to his room. She’s his estranged daughter, and he wants his grandson Louis, who he’s never met, to become his heir. She refuses. At the same time, Jacquard approaches Eugénie, to whom he was engaged two decades prior, and claims that Louis is his son. Blanche is secretly having an affair with Jacquard, but is looking to leave her husband Édouard (Clément Aubert) for him. And, yes, Blanche and Eugénie are sisters.
The hotel’s head of housekeeping, Giulia Vincent (Nolwenn Leroy), also has issues with Jacquart; she lost 10,000 francs to him in a high-stakes poker game, and he wants to collect. He’s threatening going to her manager with the debt, and she steals money from the hotel bar in desperation, hoping to parlay it into his payment. She is also Léonie’s half-sister, but doesn’t care at all whether their father gets executed or not.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Summer ’36 reminds us of other layered and complex mystery series, like Death And Other Details. That’s not necessarily a good thing, as we’ll detail below.
Our Take: Summer ’36, created by Marie Deshaires and Catherine Touzet, certainly looks great, from the scenery to the costumes, and it sounds great. But the story presented in the first episode is so complex, it’s much harder to follow than your typical period mystery series. We do get a few visual clues as to who the main suspects in Jacquard’s murder might be, but the stories of the four women at the center of the story is made more complicated than just their histories with Jacquard, and by the end of the episode, it starts getting tough to keep track of all of the sinister things the prosecutor had his hand in.
It doesn’t help that three of the four women — Eugénie, Giulia, and Blanche — are all around the same age and look very much like each other. It took a lot of the first episode for us to discern who exactly was who and what their connection to Jacquard was. Then we got the added complication that Blanche and Eugénie are sisters, as are Giulia and Léonie, and proverbial steam started pouring out our ears.
It feels needlessly complex, especially for a six-episode limited series. Isn’t it enough that these four women had beef against Jacquard, and that they will team together to figure out who killed him, perhaps while suspecting each other in the process? The side stories, extra characters, and sibling relationships may or may not come into play, but they only serve to make viewers confused, busy constructing a mental string board in their heads to keep track of it all. That certainly takes viewers out of the story, and given how many misdirects and red herrings we’re sure to get, there is a real chance that viewers will check out before the story concludes.
Performance Worth Watching: We’ll give this to Sofia Essaïdi as Eugénie, Julie de Bona as Blanche and Nolwenn Leroy as Giulia, because… well, because we are still having trouble telling them apart.
Sex And Skin: Some minor steaminess between Blanche and Jacquard, but that’s about it.
Parting Shot: We see Jacquard’s body one more time.
Sleeper Star: François-Xavier Demaison plays police Captain Alphonse Raven, and he’ll be investigating the murder along with Léonie, not knowing that she could be a suspect or that her father is on death row.
Most Pilot-y Line: Blanche’s daughter Angèle (Victoria Eber) touts the wonders of the new product called suntan lotion. Are we also going to get someone how great canned beer (invented in 1935) is, too?
Our Call: SKIP IT. Summer ’36 is far too complicated, with too many side stories, to possibly be able to focus on its central mystery. And with its limited runtime, that means that the central mystery won’t get enough time to make much sense.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
