Et is television entertainment, so you ask yourself: who is responsible for it? We have done a lot to ensure that the six-part series “The Girl and the Night” gets its due. Pauses when we feared we were not paying enough attention to the intricacies of this drama. We watched in the evenings to really get in the couch mood. Driven also by the thought that this film adaptation of a novel by Guillaume Musso – “on a high level”, “more than just a crime novel”, “deep figure drawing” – can’t be that bad. It was always whispering: Just listen to yourself.
But nothing moved there. This alleged thriller about two high school seniors who kill a teacher and face bust a quarter of a century later (book: Marston Bloom) is more boring than a five-hour traffic jam on the drive back from the Riviera. It looks like a telenovela with the soft lighting and the neat hairstyles, consists exclusively of cardboard comrades and does not create anything like atmosphere for a second from the many throwbacks to the nineties. A series like a broken bouncy castle: they keep pumping air in on one side, and it’s already escaping on the other.
The successful writer Thomas Degalais (Ioan Gruffudd), once a student at the international, elite school of Antibes near Cannes, which is enthroned above the cliffs overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, travels twenty-five years after graduating from London to France for a class reunion. He meets old friends. The entrepreneur’s son Maxime (Grégory Fitoussi), who has made it to the local politician and the pushy Stéphane (Matthias Van Khache), who became a journalist and tries to research the strange disappearance of her classmate Vinca and her teacher Clement shortly before graduation.
After thirty minutes the secret is out
Thomas gets nervous quickly. “The Girl and the Night” not only tells the story of his unrequited love for Vinca, but also that of a murder: Thomas tried to kill his teacher in front of the dramatically fluttering curtains, while Maxime brought the knife to an end. Maxime’s father, conveniently a building contractor with mafia-like experience, then had the corpse cemented in concrete in the basement of the gymnasium – “Done, boss!”
The series lasts less than thirty minutes, by which time her secret has already been revealed. Without being able to touch the viewer much. The same applies to the fate of the swarmed Vinca, who has also not been seen since the night of the murder. The many staring faces are probably to blame. Wasn’t director Bill Eagles able to persuade one of his actors to make facial expressions?
There are also screenplay ideas that are not very convincing in the cinematic context. This includes the highly mysterious (current) boarder Pauline (Ivanna Sakhno). She lives in the same room as Vinca once did, furnished it like her, and can even transform into her thanks to her red wig (“She inspires us all”). And because Pauline is also the leader of a feminist girls’ association, she has a whole suitcase with more wigs ready. Soon a dozen Vincas are disrupting the school’s celebration. They call out in unison: “Where is she, what have you done to her?” and look at Thomas ghostly.
trailers
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“The Girl and the Night”
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Video: ZDF
That’s crime quark with gravy. The “European Alliance” from France Télevision, ZDF and Rai, which is behind the filming and has been rather moderately successful so far – “Mirage”, “Around the World in 80 Days”, “The Swarm” – would have many problems during the production, including the stilted language of the narrator Thomas, riddled with TV speaking platitudes, or the idiosyncratic cast of the writer’s parents with actors who are hardly older than the main character. “Scandi Noir on the Mediterranean” is what ZDF calls it. Noir is the disappointment alone.
The girl and the night runs on Sundays at 10:15 p.m. in double episodes on ZDF and is available in the ZDF media library.
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