“Tapie” arrives on Netflix this Wednesday, September 13. Seen in preview at the CANNESIÈRES 2023 festival by AlloCiné, the series with Laurent Lafitte in the title role is one of the highly anticipated French fictions of the fall. A success ?
What is it about ?
From singer to businessman, from minister to prisoner, Bernard Tapie has experienced it all. Through his successes and his failures, Tapie traces the romantic destiny of an extraordinary public figure.
The seven episodes that constitute the mini-series Tapie are available from September 13 on Netflix.
Who is it with?
This production for Netflix co-created by the director Tristan Séguéla and the novelist and screenwriter Olivier Demangel has been talked about a lot for months since it was not dubbed at the time of its construction by the main interested party, Bernard Tapie, deceased on October 3, 2021. She is also strongly criticized by those close to her…
Laurent Lafitte (who spoke to AlloCiné about this experience) nevertheless slips into the tailor-made suits of the businessman with many victories… and many failures!
The resident of the Comédie-Française here plays opposite Joséphine Japy, Camille Chamoux and Hakim Jemili, but also Fabrice Luchini, Patrick d’Assumçao, Antoine Reinartz, Ophélia Kolb, Alexandre Blazy and Sarah Suco.
It’s worth checking out ?
Tapie is a fictionalized biopic that was originally going to be titled Wonderman. This title played on the personality of the businessman, a “wonderman” who “accomplishes miracles”, and the name of the electric battery company Wonder, which Bernard Tapie had bought for a symbolic franc and which he resold later… 470 million francs!
The businessman had also featured himself in an advertisement with the slogan “I walk like Wonder”. But Netflix ultimately opted for a more sober title.
Netflix
A mini-series of seven episodes, Tapie offers a unique look at the tormented and eventful life of the businessman, politician, former “Boss” of the Olympique de Marseille and also singer in his early years.
The actor Laurent Lafitte had the difficult task of slipping into the skin of the French personality and he offers a lively and generous performance (just like all of his partners), without making a “copy and paste” of the real protagonist of this story.
We see considerable work on the reconstruction of eras – the 60s and 70s in this specific case – but also on the creation and modeling of the cheeky, determined, ambitious and neurotic personality of this businessman and politician through his successes and his failures.
Netflix
Through cards at the start of each episode, the series assumes that it is inspired by real facts but fictionalizes and modifies certain details concerning in particular those close to Bernard Tapie and personal passages from his daily life. Tapie is not a biopic strictly speaking but a fairly stylized (sometimes a little too much?) vision of the businessman’s destiny.
Because we notice from the start of the series a certain dramatization of the significant stages of Bernard Tapie’s career, supported by a very present soundtrack, between the hits of the time and deafening classical music. The Tapie series often leans toward soap opera with some dialogue that is sometimes overplayed.
Certain sequences are nevertheless impressive, notably the one where Bernard Tapie faces the prosecutor Eric de Montgolfier for almost half an hour on screen… Finally, if the series is quite conventional and wise from the start, it nevertheless offers throughout its viewing a beautiful retrospective of the emblematic moments of the life and work of this much-maligned public figure.