TV Show - Kepler (s)
Score 7/10
Country : France
Filming locations : not specified
Language : French ( a bit of English, and one or two more)
Duration : 0h52 minutes X 6 episodes
Aired : 2018-2019
Full production and cast member on IMDb
Samuel Kepler is a police commander suffering from a dissociative disorder, brought on by trauma. Against orders, he takes on an investigation...details further down.
In the original French, they say that he has "three passengers cohabitating in his brain", corresponding to a DID (Dissociative identity disorder), a rare diagnosis in France - I'll discuss this later.
His three personalities sometimes take control. In Paris, one of them is at the origin of a blunder, which leads Samuel to desk duties, in a Calais Police office.
When Lucie, the daughter of his wife's boss disappears and his superior refuses to send anyone to investigate what he's sure to be a run-away case, Samuel decides to investigate and goes back into the field. Helped by Alice Haddad, he investigates this disappearance in a tense context between defenders and opponents of migrants - whilst also struggling with his mental state.
Marc Lavoine, whom I'd only known as a singer until this role, plays Samuel Kepler. He and Sofia Essaïdï as Alice Haddad lead the story, and I found their acting credible and human - they each have issues to go through, relationships and their career, not to mention stress with co-workers.
Overall cast plays well and though the main story does have an ending, a few elements remain untold.
I liked the overall atmosphere and that answers aren't given immediately ; it's a short, 6 episode mini-series, mixing drama, suspense and human stories - even if some are quite inhuman characters, who do really bad things.
The score is well balanced, suspenseful when needed, and not overused : there are quite a few moments when the scene speaks for itself, with no discernable music.
However, there were a few times the music overpowered the dialogues, making them less defined and with my hearing loss, I lost a few words. So the issue is more about relative volumes (and that the streaming platform where I watched it had no subtitles).
Dialogues are well written, but the majority of the show fails on the Bechdel test ; the rare scenes when women talk to one another were mostly about men, and if I recall, there were only a couple scenes in 6 episodes where the show passed this test...Yes, women had names, and personality, but they were also in an awful ratio on-screen - some scenes had no woman, others had one or two women, to 15+ men... Only ONE scene had several women, and only one was talking to Alice...
Pacing is well done, each episode finishes on a sort of cliffhanger and the next resumes either moments or hours later.
The bloody scenes are tame in several instances, and only a couple times they are bloodier, but in all cases, they are very short.
Cinematography is actually well made, even artistic for the DID segments as well as another scene, shot in an angle -tilted by about 45° I'd say - like Orson Wells and Hitchcock did.
As for DID and question on how Samuel was in his job, I found that in France, a diagnosis for DID is very very rare, as local research about it had lacked for decades and only resumed in 2004.
Samuel hides his condition, saying that he's ok and taking his meds, when in truth, every turn of his investigation costs bits of his sanity. There are scenes where either his DID or his ptsd flashbacks are shown - and luckily, none of it changes the graphic content from my previous note.
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