![]() Also impressive and key to creating sympathy are the actors who play their flashback teenage selves, Mamadou Haidara and Ludmilla Makowski. Like Sy, Sagnier brings a lot of soul to her part - though onscreen far less, she’s as important as Sy to the series’ success - and the two actors have great chemistry. His most obvious failing is that his criminal shenanigans and revenging make him less than reliable in his daily life, affecting his relationships with ex-partner Claire (Ludivine Sagnier, whom domestic audiences might recognize from “The Young Pope” and “The New Pope”), who despairs of his inability to show up on time to see his son Raoul (Etan Simon). If Assane seems practically perfect in every way, he is not perfectly perfect. “The Queen’s Gambit,” about a female chess prodigy (Anya Taylor-Joy), is exciting, entertaining and convincing - especially when it comes to the game itself. Television Review: Netflix’s audacious chess drama, ‘The Queen’s Gambit,’ is your perfect weekend binge (That the detective also shares an initial with Lupin’s own adversary, Inspector Ganimard, is possibly not a coincidence.) ![]() This fanship goes as far as borrowing practical ideas from the stories and constructing aliases out of anagrams of “Arsene Lupin,” a habit that will attract the interest of a low-level police detective (Soufiane Guerrab as Youssef Guedira) who shares Assane’s love of the books. A collection of Lupin stories, a gift from his father - whose undeserved fate Assane set himself to avenge in long-delayed, Count of Monte Cristo style - has made the books a foundation of his life and profitably illicit career. Inspired by but not based on the short stories and novels written by Maurice Leblanc between 1905 and his death in 1941, which themselves play a part in the narrative, “Lupin” (subtitle: “In the Shadow of Arsène”) stars Omar Sy as Assane Diop, a first-generation French-Senegalese man in contemporary Paris. (In France, the character has appeared in film adaptations, several television series, at least two daily comic strips, an operetta and more.) And yet for whatever reason, without any firsthand knowledge, his was a name rattling around in the big box of pop-cultural bric-a-brac that is my brain I knew, anyway that he was a “gentleman thief,” like Leslie Charteris’ The Saint, or David Niven in “The Pink Panther.” “Lupin” refers to the character Arsène Lupin, not particularly well known in the United States these days despite having been played on the American screen by John Barrymore and Melvyn Douglas among others. It’s a long bandwagon you may want to join if you’d like to be somewhere else for a while, a trip to Paris filled with pretty people and views, with action and emotions and just enough meaning - matters of race and class and such - to make you feel that that there is something substantial to the melodrama. The first episode is arranged to make you think one thing, which raises all kinds of questions, and leaves you thinking quite another, which raises questions of its own. 8 debut, even more than “The Queen’s Gambit,” the chances are good you have - and are spoiler averse, you may want to stop reading now. If you are a person who watches Netflix, you have no doubt been greeted on arrival by a recommendation to watch “Lupin.” If you have not already begun to watch it - and with the streamer having announced an expected 70 million households had at least taken a peek within a month of its Jan.
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