Les Revenants
Céline’s role:
Scriptwriter
Céline was part of the writing team for Season 1, but she left before the series was made. She is thanked at the end of each episode of season 1.
English Title
The Returned
Year
2012
Synopsis
In
a small French mountain town many dead people reappear apparently alive and
normal, including teenage school bus crash victim Camille, suicidal bridegroom
Simon, a small boy called "Victor" who was murdered by burglars, and
serial killer Serge. While they try to resume their lives, strange phenomena
take place: recurring power outages; a mysterious lowering of the local
reservoir's water level, revealing the presence of dead animals and a church
steeple; and the appearance of strange marks on the bodies of the living and
the dead.
Honours/Awards
- The first season has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
- No. 1 Television show for 2013, The Guardian
- Winner Best Drama Series, 41st International Emmy Awards, 2013
- Winner, Peabody Award 2013
- Nominated for Best Television Series or Miniseries, 18th Satellite Awards
- Nominated for Outstanding Achievement in Movies, Miniseries & Specials, 2014 TCA Awards
Excerpts from reviews
“The Returned is such a delicately detailed
drama that, by the end, you feel as if you have finished a beautiful, brilliant
novel rather than a TV series – a sentence I thought I would go to my grave
without ever having cause to say. The only fear is that season two, due later
this year, cannot possibly be as good.”
The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/feb/20/the-returned-box-set-review-french-drama
"Sundance’s new French import, The Returned (Les Revenants in its country of origin), succeeds so tremendously because it understands all of the above—and finds an ingenious horror metaphor with which to depict it. A loose adaptation of a French film of the same name, the series centers on a small village that becomes home to five former corpses.
…
Though it is a series with a great many strong male characters, the beating heart of the program is its women, who adapt and evolve and refuse to give up, even when assaulted by a killer in a dark alley or discovering a long-dead daughter poking around in her old bedroom."
Notes
The television series sprang from the film Les
Revenant (20014) directed by Robin Campillo’s (director of BPM), but
it is in a different setting and has different character, and just uses the idea
of people returning to a small French town as the basis of the story.
I will confess that the film and this tv series are the first zombie genre viewing that I have done, and I have had to reassess my previous dismissal of this genre. That said, I haven’t viewed any others, and my reading suggests that Les Revenant/s (film & tv series) are in a different class to the average zombie flick!
Céline Sciamma was involved in planning out
the storyline of the first series, but I can’t find a clear reason why she left
the project (this seems fair enough—we don’t need to know everything!). Her
contribution is acknowledged by being thanked at the end of each episode of
Season 1.
The budget of season 1 was €11.4 million and over the two seasons we meet lots of faces that are familiar to viewers of French films.
Some connections to films viewed in the Adèle Haenel FilmFestival and Les Revenants:
- Clothile Hesme was in Trois Mondes (2011) & LeRêve de Camille (2014).
- Céline Sallette was in L'Apollonide (2011) and Un Peuple Son Roi (2017).
- Guillaume Marquet, who plays young policeman Alcide in Les Revenants, appeared in the 2010 television film Goldman and also in Un Peuple Son Roi (2017).
- Guillaume Gouix, who plays Serge Garrell (the serial killer) in Les Revenants, appeared in Aliyah (2012) with Adèle as Mathias.
- Frédéric Pierrot, who plays Jérôme Séguret, father of Léna and Camille in the television series Les Revenants [and Gardet In the Robin Campillo film of the same name] appeared in Les Diables (2002) as the man in the house.
- Armande Boulanger (Season 2) is the inquisitive student in Portrait de la Jeune Fille en Feu (2019)
- Nicolas Wanczycki (Season 2) is the mean army instructor in Les Combattants (2014).
- It is getting a bit tenuous, but what the hell:
- Jenna Thiam, who plays Léna in Les Revenants, plays the role of Axèle in the feature film L'Indomptée (the film this snippet grew up to be). This is Adèle's role in this snippet.
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