RETURN OF THE RETURNED
As France’s rare but hugely successful foray into TV fantasy returns to our screens, its creator tells GERARD GILBERT that it is more than a tale of dead people coming back. It addresses ‘existentialist questions’ too
A 15-year-old schoolgirl lets herself into her home and immediately raids the fridge for a snack, munching nonchalantly as her mother creeps down the stairs, the look on her face one of mounting incredulity; she can barely speak, as if afraid that the sound of her voice will make this apparition disappear. The girl, who is called Camille, becomes more and more freaked out by the reactions of her family. Why are they so shocked to see her?
Thus began one of the best television shows of last year, when it was shown on Channel 4.
The hauntingly atmospheric 10-hour French “zombie drama” The Returned (or Les
Revenants as it’s called in its home territory) was actually made and screened in France by Canal+ in 2012, but international recognition has followed slowly and steadily in its wake – winning an International Emmy and a Peabody Award, being cited by no less than Stephen King as his favourite TV series, and then receiving the sincerest form of flattery that the American television industry can bestow, an English-language remake.
Camille (played by the 20-year-old FrenchLebanese actress Yara Pilartz) is one of a group of children from a close-knit Alpine community who died alongside their teachers four years earlier, when their school coach inexplicably swerved and crashed over the side of a hydroelectric dam. She is one of several deceased inhabitants of the fictional town ( The Returned is actually filmed in and around Annecy in the Haute-Savoie) who suddenly take up where they left off when alive, much to the guilt, relief, horrified fascination and, in some cases, religious fervour of their surviving loved ones.
Other “returnees” include “Victor”, the creepily cute and enigmatic eight-year-old who turns out to be really called Louis, and who was murdered by intruders 35 years previously; and Simon, a young man who supposedly committed suicide on his wedding day 10 years before, and now haunts his one-time bride-to-be, Adèle.
The performances – especially the wonderfully naturalistic youngsters Pilartz and Swann Nambotin, who plays Victor/Louis – are uniformly excellent, and add to The Returned’s underlying sense of realism, an intimate, very human investigation of the question: what would happen if the dead started coming back to life?
“In France we don’t have that many fantasy series or films with aliens or zombies, so we tried to imagine something realistic,” says creator Fabrice Gobert, who found inspiration from sources as diverse as the Swedish vampire movie Let the
Right One In, E4’s superpower fantasy Misfits and Gregory Crewdson’s menacingly surreal photographs of small-town America. “I generally don’t like fantasy shows,” he says. “I prefer
The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, where it’s a bit slow and focused on the characters. When we started thinking about the series a fewyears ago, Canal+ used the term ‘supernatural soap’.”
“For me, The Returned has always been a series about love... family ties, what it means to be a mother... and rather than fantastic plot twists, we are looking for intimate storylines.”
Such dedication to atmosphere (filming is restricted to between 4pm and 9pm to give it a twilight feel) and the realism of the characterisation left some fans underwhelmed after the finale of the first series, with what one critic called “plot threads left dangling in the wind”, and such unanswered questions as why no one could leave town, why the water level of the reservoir kept dropping, and with whom the Returned were aiming to get even. There were even aggrieved comparisons to the famously disappointing denouement of Lost.
“I think at the end of season one there may have been too many questions for a part of the audience,” admits Gobert. “Canal+ warned us ‘be careful, because if you go too far into mysteries and leave too many questions, you will lose part of the audience’.”
The questions will be answered in the new series, he promises. “But you have to be patient,
you have to wait,” he says. “Why people dead come back is the main question everybody asks me, but it’s not the only question. There are other existentialist questions.” But what about the criticism levelled at
Lost – that the writers were just making it up as they went along? Is he guilty of this too? Gobert says that the core story arc of The
Returned has never changed, just the finer details. “There are ideas that I had at the very beginning of the whole thing”, he says. “But there are also a lot of things that I discovered while writing it. It’s a mix; you have to be very attached to some strong main ideas, but you can evolve them.”
Season two begins six months after the end of the first. The authorities have finally taken an interest after the town was flooded in the season finale , but the military are still refusing to believe the mass resurrections. The place is deserted apart from the army, the apocalyptic cult the Helping Hand, and those, like Adèle (Clotilde Hesme), who is pregnant with undead former fiancé Simon’s child, and Camille’s guiltridden sister Lena (Jenna Thiam), who is still looking for the mother and sister taken by the “revenants” at the end of the last series.
“We’re acting now and not reacting”, says Thiam, the russet-haired actress who has become the breakout star of The Returned. “Season one opens and stuff is happening and we don’t know how to react – we’re just thrown into something we don’t want. Season two opens and each character knows what they want – Adèle doesn’t want the child, I want to find my sister, Simon wants to go get the child... everything’s really clear.”
Pierre Perrier, the Parisian actor who plays Simon, says his characterwill have a foot in both worlds. “He’s connected to the living through his wife, and this baby, who is going to be a hybrid between the two”, says Perrier. And then there’s poor, heavily pregnant Adèle, suffering nightmares straight out of Alien and Rosemary’s
Baby. “I like to have a lot of references”, says Gobert. “Clotilde has a short haircut like Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby, but it’s completely by chance because she had just made a movie where her character was ill with cancer.”
By their own admission, the French have never been in the habit of creating world-class TV drama and The Returned is a vindication for Canal+ as it strayed from the comfort of its usual crime shows. “It was the first time they had made a fantasy series,” says Gobert. “They didn’t think at all that it would suit their audience, so first of all, in France, it surprised me that it worked. In England, I did not expect it [success] at all...”
The two main differences between now and, say, five years ago, is the greater British acceptance of subtitled drama, and the intense online scrutiny. “All this audience analysis and reactions on social networks... so many people posting things in debates, that’s something new for a French show”, says Jimmy Desmarais from production company Haut et Court, who made The Returned as well as the 2004 movie of the same name that the TV show was loosely based upon. “We never thought of being international, we never designed it for any market, it was just our dream series”, says Desmarais.
“We’ve seen at the Mipcom [the annual television trade show held in Cannes] and other events, even the Americans are beginning to think that maybe one day they will think of showing subtitled series to a broader audience than just Sundance. So mentalities have changed very fast in just two or three years.”
In the meantime, of course, The Returned was duly remade in English for mainstream American TV, and duly cancelled after one season. Pierre Perrier watched the first episode, but says he found it “too weird” watching an American version of his character, Simon. Why did he think the US version failed? “It wasn’t as good as ours?”, he shrugs with a laugh. Never a truer word said in jest.
Season two of ‘The Returned’ begins on Friday 16 October on More4