The New Yorker:

Jean-Pascal Zadi’s episodic follow-up to his breakout feature film embraces a wide-ranging satirical vision of France at large.

By Richard Brody 

The French miniseries “Represent,” which is streaming on Netflix, veers toward movie-ness for practical reasons. With its six half-hour episodes, it’s shorter than many features, and all six are directed by the same person, Jean-Pascal Zadi—who is also its star, its co-creator (with François Uzan), and the co-writer of every episode (with Uzan and others). Zadi is a longtime director of independent films and music videos, and is also a rapper and a comedian. His 2020 feature, “Simply Black,” a comedy about the efforts of a well-intentioned but blundering Black French actor (played by Zadi) to convert his artistic frustration into political action, is among the most effervescent and pointedly original of recent French films. Like that film, “Represent” is something of a one-man show, albeit one that teems with a broad array of characters and settings, and that embraces a wide-ranging vision of France at large.

“Represent” essentially starts where “Simply Black” left off: the feature film, set in Paris, is centered on the lack of Black people, and of meaningful depictions of Black lives, in French media. “Represent,” however, is anchored in the workaday lives of Black people who are shunted off to massive, ghetto-like housing projects in the suburbs of Paris. The series is premised on their lack of real political power, owing in part to the false and distorted images of Black people that the media perpetuates—and the show dramatizes, with a grandly conceptual exaggeration, a comedic fast lane to that power. Zadi plays Stéphane Blé, a youth counsellor in a housing project, who is transformed by a rapid turn of circumstance into a candidate for France’s Presidency. The series is filled with extravagant (and sometimes far-fetched) byways, sharp satirical observations, and comedic performances that range from antic to caustic, from self-deprecating to moralizing. Unlike “Simply Black,” “Represent” groans under the weight of convention, or of dictate, but its ideas are as potent as those of the movie, and are even more diagnostically significant. “Represent” draws its over-all force from a surprising and audacious idea: an attempt to define, and to redefine, France’s political left.

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