Lupin wasn't about recasting Lupin, it's about a modern person who is inspired by the stories. I'm not really sure what that has to do with historical fidelity? I really enjoyed it, it's a fun modern crime show that deals earnestly with issues of race in contemporary France.
They're making this move because the EU mandated[1] that locally produced content comprise at least 30% of their catalog. The subsidy expansion is a byproduct of that regulation.
1. https://www.engadget.com/2018-09-04-netflix-amazon-european-...
As someone who is english, what am I missing? Its a modern day rebrand of a 30's crime novel no?
I imagine i'd understand more if I could differentiate french accents.
However, someone decided that half of each episode should be the main character's miserable childhood. He's a poor immigrant's child whose father is blamed by the local white rich for a crime he didn't commit and dies in prison, leaving our main character an orphan. We're getting shown that in excruciating detail.
They basically spliced together a pretty good action-ish/heist movie and a depressing festival movie designed to take golden globes or something.
At least for the first 4-5 episodes, because afterwards i simply stopped watching. It was either that or skip all childhood scenes, i.e. half of each episode.
Could you elaborate on this?
Napoleon and De Gaulle are characters that are usually viewed positively in France, they were important figures that did big things for the nation (such as freeing it from the nazis). But you don't need to scratch the surface very deep to see the dark side: imperialism, colonialism, racism, despotism...
I don't particularly trust Netflix not to whitewash these leaders. It'd be easy to gloss over the not-so-shiny stuff and present them as one-sided heros to the French people, who are not always taught the dark side of their own history.
Here, he was basically mocked (over size etc). Because he went in, brought war with him, history books have people flying city when his army is comming and he blew the castle. So basically the history is only the negative, because foreign army matching through country means hunger and violence.
Not just that, but you also gotta remember his failed invasion of Russian Empire.
He got cocky, went all-in, didn't realize how brutal winters there were, and didn't expect that Russian generals were more than willing to set their own cities/towns on fire just to not let Napoleon capture them. So in the end, he had to retreat back to France during winter. Which not only marked his invasion as a complete failure, but also humiliated him on top of it by making him lose a ton of his soldiers on the way back due to the weather.
Not that Russian generals would care about people that they diaplaced. But emptying those places of supplies was not just preventing capture in abstract. It was meaningfully weakening ennemy army, the same way shooting at them does. Logistics makes it breaks wars in general.
In a way, it is interesting that these realities are mostly lost from contemporary stories about wars. We like to paint heroic fights in past, but don't like to show where the food soldiers eat comes from. When we do talk about it, we use euphemisms like "living off the land" as if they were hunting and collecting berries.
Absolutely agreed. My original reply wasn't meant to paint Russian generals as stupid for setting their cities/towns on fire. In fact, I believe that if it wasn't for that, then Napoleon would have been way more successful in his invasion, as he was pretty much stomping the Russian military up until it got to point of capturing major cities.
In fact, Mikhail Kutuzov[0] (Russian Empire commander-in-chief at the time who was responsible for coming up with the plan to burn down Russian cities rather than giving them to Napoleon) is remembered as an exceptional military commander and a hero to this day. He let Napoleon occupy burned down Moscow, so that Napoleon army could be starved and then driven out using guerilla warfare.
The French inch was longer than the English inch at the time and the press either didn't know this or knew it and thought it'd be funny to miss-characterize.
De Gaulle was again subject to what you might call the ""woke mob"" during his lifetime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_68
People have to learn to cope with accurate presentation of what historical figures did, a lot of which was very bad especially for the losing side.
In fact, wouldn't Napoleon be part (and the end ?) of the absolutist monarch phenomenon?
That is how countries typically interpret history - from their point of view.
I'm From France , my country back movies with hundreds of millions of funding every year. New European laws are forcing governements to open those fundings to "Foreign Institutions", that's why they are making this move.
This law enable Netflix to make content much cheaper using public funding while using each country culture to improve customer retention.
As a French coming from African descent I'm absolutly terrified of what they are going to do with character like Napoleon or Charles de Gaulles...
Lupin show a clear tendency to override history fidelity toward a much more political narrative... It's frightening because they is literally THOUSANDS of story that do contain French coming from African Descent or Foreigners soldiers who decided to fought for France[0]
Seeing Big tech taking over everything with a political agenda is deeply saddening.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senegalese_Tirailleurs