A dive into the early 90s alongside a teenager of today who is determined to prevent the death of a young man, does that tell you? Then the new Netflix series Les 7 vies de Léa is made for you!
What is it about ?
Léa hates her life… She will live 7 of them. When she comes across the body of Ismaël, a teenager who disappeared thirty years earlier, Léa returns to 1991 and wakes up every morning in the body of a different person. Can she save him?
Back in the past
Created by screenwriter Charlotte Sanson, who collaborated on the script for the series Hippocrates and the Netflix film How I became a superhero, Les 7 vies de Léa is an adaptation of the novel The 7 lives of Leo Belami by Nataël Trapp, published in 2019.
For the series, the hero of the book, Léo, has become Léa, a 17-year-old teenager in the midst of an existential crisis, who no longer has a taste for life and foments dark thoughts. But the discovery of a corpse in the Gorges du Verdon will change his destiny. Because the day after this macabre encounter, the young girl will wake up in the skin of the deceased, a certain Ishmael… in 1991!
But Léa is not at the end of her surprises: each time she falls asleep in the past, she comes back to the present, and when she goes back to sleep in 2021, she goes back 30 years but in a new body. . During her travels, the young girl will quickly fall under the spell of Ishmael who happened to be her parents’ best friend. She will then do everything to prevent his death.
Lou Faulon/Netflix
A gripping plot
In line with Parallèles on Disney+, another recent French series where teenagers have to deal with fantastic events, Les 7 vies de Léa is a breathtaking fiction that is sure to give rise to theories on the reason for Ismaël’s death in each end of episode. A mystery that we want to solve as soon as possible!
If the series is not free from flaws (the voice-over is often too much, time travel gives rise to some inconsistencies…), it is on the whole sympathetic and addresses many themes specific to adolescence. such as emancipation from the family straitjacket, ill-being, the discovery of one’s sexuality, harassment and of course the strength of friendship.
Lou Faulon/Netflix
Léa’s constant body changes (who sometimes finds herself in the skin of her parents) and her adaptation to the 1990s obviously provoke moments of comedy, but the emotion also knows how to be present in Léa’s 7 lives.
Performed by a cast of young actors to follow (Raïka Hazanavicius, Khalil Ben Gharbia, Maïra Schmitt, Alexander Ferrario, Marguerit Thiam and Théo Fernandez des Tuche), the heroes of the series are for the most endearing and even the most clichéd characters like the tyrant or the plague of service have a right to their developments.
Season 1 of the 7 lives of Léa is available in full on Netflix.