For most artists, the idea that their work is only complete when there is an audience to interact with is self-evident.
In the world of literature, you have novelists like Ruth Ozeki Singing about how fiction is forever a joint effort between writer and reader: “When our minds connect, our hearts open, our tones begin to resonate with the words on the page, and the result is collaboration, joint creation, and a book we can’t put down.” In the world of visual art, on the one hand, twentieth-century theorists like Walter Benjamin Benning have theses on the idea of aura– in the sense that the supernatural sense of authenticity that a work of art can have when viewed by an audience – on the other hand, working contemporary artists such as watercolor painters Kristi Grossendorf Saying frankly that “Success is when [a] The painting has its own relationship and conversation with the viewer.”
And in the world of entertainment? Well, I got big success. Which, if fiction is a story made together by the reader and writer, and art is the locus of a semi-supernatural aura accessible only through the act of watching, then the celebrity – that is, the fact that a person is not only incredibly famous, but after such a spectacle is created For the overall picture to be read and analyzed as closely as any great work of art – all that and more.
That, at least, is the premise that creator Dominic Bishard and presenter Fanny Herrero has been working on since developing the award-winning French comedy series. Call my agent! (in France, dicks percent), which takes as its subject not only the humorous inner workings of a small Parisian talent agency, but also the private vanity and anxiety of very real French celebrities with whom its fictitious clients work.
Starring Camille Cotten, Thibaut de Montalembert, Gregory Montell, Lilian Rovere, and Fanny Sidney as the core team of the fictional ASK agency, Call my agent!– which is broadcast entirely to American audiences on Netflix – begs the question, what if the brightest artistic lights in France could read the celebrity as the script and manipulate it in a fun and entirely new way? That is, what if French celebrities could develop a (general) sense of humor about their own image?
To the American public, this question may seem silly. After all, there’s nothing American celebrities love more than staring sweetly at the reflection of their own image: Julia Roberts plays Julia Roberts in Ocean 12. James Van Der Beek plays James Van Der Beek in Do not trust B in apartment 23. Keanu Reeves plays Keanu Reeves always be maybe. Nic Cage plays Nic Cage in The unbearable weight of talent. Everyone plays their part loops. Everyone plays their part curb your enthusiasm. Everyone plays their part real hollywood husbands. Everyone plays themselves, even, in Sesame Street. At this point, a “personal” line of credit is practically a rite of passage when it comes to American character.
But as Call my agent!And Andrea Martel (Camel Cotten), his favorite boss’s whore agent, notes in interview 2021 With Irish TimesHistorically, the same has not been true of French celebrities. “It’s not French tradition at all,” Cotten tells the newspaper, explaining the difficulty the French series had in recruiting big French names for the guest star in the show’s first season. “We tend to think of ourselves as artists, and self-mockery or self-mimicry is not something that comes naturally to us.”
and yet, Call my agent! He was finally able to book elite A French celebrity. In the series’ first short season alone, Herrero and her team managed to attract Cécile de France, Lyn Renaud, Françoise Fabien and Joester. By the end of the fourth (and final) season, that list Celebrity Actresses It has grown to include Juliette Binoche, Jay Marchand, Isabelle Huppert, Jean Dujardin, Jean Reno, Natalie Bay, and NBA star Tony Parker, and although this may not be surprising, given the American celebrities’ dedication to self-irony described above – the Hollywood legend Sigourney Weaver, who fell in love with the first seasons of the series She signed up for the project without reading a single page of Hererro’s proposed text.
Brits’ embrace of sending celebrities to their stars is rooted instead in a kind of fault-tolerance for each person.
What won in the end these serious French artists Call my agent!a reason? According to Cotten, it was irony and tenderness with which the Herero team dealt with the history and artists behind French cinema. But it doesn’t take a cinematographer to understand that in addition to taking the art with which big names like Renaud, Binoche and Dujardin have linked their personal and professional reputations, Call my agent! Not afraid to treat celebrities from her co-stars like the scripts they do, she invites both the actor and the audience into the kind of incredible collaboration that makes all the narrative art feel alive.
delightfully, Call my agent!Understanding Celebrity as a successful script proved to be reimagined for him many of markets. In fact, he is officially set to overtake SKAM For most international modifications (Chart 9 to SKAM ‘s Seven). The latest market to get dicks percent shocked? Well, from its global debut last weekend, it will be the UK, where W1AJohn Morton took the French model and, using his signature style, turned it into something all-British (read: awkwardly).
Echoing the original title of the French version, ten percent (Referring to the cuts traditionally taken by agents from their clients’ paychecks) stars Jack Davenport, Lydia Leonard, Maggie Stead, Prasanna Poanarajah, and Hivtu Quasam as key players behind the half-fallen Nightingale Heart Agency, and it follows that, in season one, many of the same storylines as its Gallic predecessor. Whereas ASK has represented notables like Gerard Lanvin and Charlotte Gainsburg, Nightingale Heart has on its roster the likes of Helena Bonham Carter, David Oyelowo, Kelly MacDonald, Hamish Patel, Olivia Williams, Emma Corinne and Dominic West.
Convincingly, while the French might have, Cotten states, historically loathed for doing something as bizarre as parody their famous people by playing fictional versions of themselves for laughs, the British perfected the art long ago. What is Red Nose Day, after all, if not a 34-year-old dispatch of a famous comedian in an entire country?
But when Brits are experts on form, their dedication to self-irony isn’t based on the same (if amusing) narcissism as Hollywood. Rather, distinct and literally far removed from the myth of Hollywood perfection that it is, the British take on sending celebrities their stars rooted instead in some kind of fallibility for everyone. This is a self-read by Morton ten percentin its first season, tends to every turn, but perhaps most brazenly in Episode 3, where Dominic West (as Dominic West) finds himself represented in a production of village He has the personality so obsessed with his own image that he constantly documents, in real time, using his smartphone, the images he takes during his monologues that arrive on a triple screen of cinema-size screens behind him the moment they reach the cloud.
Both Call my agent! And ten percent He made their audience aware of their complicity in the making of celebrity legends themselves.
the West ten percentSeeing him absolutely hate this, his constant image distracts him to the point of panic (a problem, of course, that only his old agent can solve). How would the West feel in the real world about such a project? Well, that is the question of the hour. As noted scholar Anne-Helen Petersen notes in her writing on the seismic shifts in power that have changed the idea of celebrity over the past few decades in the (mostly American) cultural landscape, How do Celebrity text for the star is mediation. When said mediation occurs in a glossy magazine cover, the text is formatted to the point of dullness; When mediated by the star’s social media, it’s polished to a legendary shine.
Petersen wrote in a recent article on “The Appeal” New Yorker Jeremy Strong glimpsed that, by soaring barely above the dwelling, he managed to make a fuss about protecting the image of what felt like half of Hollywood. “I hope some celebrity understands this more: to exercise complete control over one’s image also means to erase all shivering and interest, the heart of their allure and charm.”
What happens, then, when celebrities are mediated by the writers’ room on a project like Call my agent! or ten percent? As the above list of self-deprecating American projects confirms, this is something else entirely. or at least that can Be: By handing a celebrity script to a group of comedians, West and all the other guest stars in ten percent They—like the satisfactorily unserious Hollywood stars Van der Beek, Roberts, and Cage before them—deliver enough control that they invite him back in a state of exasperation that Petersen laments his absence.
That is, what we see when we see the West in anger, the rage against the dying smartphone camera light of Hamlet, may not, in fact, be representative of the West’s lowest artistic temperament and personal demons. At the same time, despite the ambiguous realism of ten percentThe public hypothesis calls for belief can He is.
Herein lies the power of the “fake talent agency/real celebrity agency” hypothesis: by making their audience have to think about how these poor presentations of French and British stars contribute to the scripts of real-life celebrities, both Call my agent! And ten percent It made their audience, at the same time, aware of their complicity in making celebrity legends themselves.
And as far as viewing experiences go, this is just good fun.
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New episodes of ten percent Drop in on Fridays at Sundance Now and AMC+, and stream it the next on AMC. All four seasons Call my agent! Streaming now on Netflix.
