Week 3 - Lupin

For this week's post, I decided to watch part of a series instead of a movie. The series is called Lupin, a French mystery series about professional thief Assane Diop, the son of an immigrant that was wrongfully killed for a robbery accusation. This was the first French series I've ever watched, and I was surprised that my 4 years of French did little to nothing to help me understand it. The French they speak is so different from textbook French that it almost sounds like a new language when you listen to it. But anyways, back to my review. 

As I said before, Diop's father was killed because of an accusation of being a thief. So what would be the most logical thing to do to avenge him? Become a thief... obviously. Assane's father was framed by his wealthy employer, Hubert Pellegrini, over the theft of a diamond necklace, so Diop makes it his goal to get revenge on him. I really enjoy heist/mystery series, so I had high expectations for this series. And I have to say I was pretty impressed. It's really fun escapist entertainment with a good balance of humor, mystery, suspense, and emotion that hooks you on to every episode. I finished 5 in one sitting, and each runs from 40-50 minutes. The one drawback of the show was that it went a little slow, but the plot was pretty engaging. My only complaint is that it was more of a reading exercise than watching a show. The captions went pretty fast and I feel like I wasn't able to capture a lot of the nuances that French-speaking people would have picked up on. It seemed like the captions lacked a lot of depth that was happening, which is a theme I'm sure will repeat with the continuation of this blog series. 

One interesting thing about this show was that the main character was given a book about "the gentleman thief Arsene Lupin" by his father. Diop then decided to base his criminal persona off Lupin. I thought this was cool because I've read the book, and Diop wasn't too far off of what Lupin actually did. It was nice to have a little more background than other watchers. It kind of felt like I had an inside joke going with the main character and I could predict some of his actions before they happened. I would give this series a 4/5, and I would recommend everyone that enjoys mystery movies/shows to watch it. 

-Aryan