From ImpersoNation to ImPosture: (Sub)urban Fantasy in Fanny Herrero’s Dix pour cent and Drôle

Abstract

Expanding on the Introduction’s conceptualisations of postnational screen fiction, this chapter examines two Netflix series, Dix pour cent/Call My Agent! and Drôle/Standing Up, to suggest that postnational French television exploits similar strategies of ImpersoNation (Elsaesser, European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Ebook, 2005; ‘ImpersoNations: National Cinema, Historical Imaginaries and New Cinema Europe.’ Mise au point 5. https://map.revues.org/1480, 2013) to those found in the cinema from which it partially descends. It further argues that at times the type of ImpersoNation in evidence in these audiovisual fictions can be productively dubbed ImPosture, since it articulates a fictionalised version of Frenchness for external consumption that fairly directly contravenes observable realities. Yet instead of seeing such a commercially embedded gesture merely in terms of cynical self-promotion, the author asserts that the potential to generate new psycho-social possibilities by widening legitimised representations of French identities emerges from reading for Frenchness as ImPosture.

Michel Chion has argued that French cinematic dialogue is polarised between a refined, highfalutin version of standard French and a folkloric working-class slang. While he attributes this partly to the non-neutrality of the French language as such, he also speculates that the idiom’s already restricted, ‘unmarked’ middle ground may be suffering further erosion under the influence of screen cultures. More particularly, he singles out as a key culprit for this phenomenon the rise of television formats such as the literary chat show adopting a pretence of agreeably down-to-earth candour: thus he laments the use of the increasingly ubiquitous colloquial and familiar term bouquin in lieu of the traditionally unmarked moniker livre by personal acquaintances to describe his book publications, with the consequence that livre is pushed into the realms of formality (Chion 2008, 7, 12).

The majority of the films examined by Chion have enjoyed distinguished international careers. This is perhaps unsurprising, given the compatibility of his observations about their linguistic tendencies with Thomas Elsaesser’s theorisation of cinematic ImpersoNation (2005, 46–67, 2013). Sometimes also dubbed ‘self-othering’, ImpersoNation refers to the inclusion of ‘self-conscious, ironic or self-mocking display[s] of clichés and prejudices’ in the cinematic construction of national imaginaries designed to play to ‘the look of the other’ (2005, 49). Like the types of language and in particular the associated upper- and lower-class social identities identified by Chion in French cinema, clichés are sedimented when mere everyday occurrences or figures become extreme in their frequency or scale—self-conscious clichés even more so. Elsaesser situates a turn to ImpersoNation in European cinema within the expansion of postnational filmmaking during the 1990s, linked to newly border-crossing production arrangements. However, Elsaesser’s definition of postnational as ‘reintroduc[ing] the national for external use’ (2005, 57) takes in new representational developments, too:

The films have developed formulas that can accommodate various and even contradictory signifiers of nationhood, of regional history or local neighborhood street-credibility, in order to re-launch a region or national stereotype, or to reflect the image that (one assumes) the other has of oneself. […] [T]he films openly display this knowledge of second order reference. (Elsaesser 2005, 58)

The novelty of the phenomenon’s ‘second-order’ self-consciousness is well illustrated directly following this passage via a contrast between an earnest claim by a character in Wim Wenders’s Kings of the Road (1976) that ‘the Yanks have colonized our subconscious’ and Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996) protagonist Mark Renton’s statement that ‘[s]ome people hate the English but I don’t. They’re just wankers. We, on the other hand, are colonized by wankers.’ If the second utterance is much more distanced from any essentialist inhabitation of Scottishness by othering itself, it nevertheless also draws a link with earlier depictions of national identity—as Elsaesser acknowledges. It is likewise apparent that the 29 transhistorical films examined by Chion spanning from the early sound era (from Sous les toits de Paris/Under the Roofs of Paris [René Clair, 1930]) to postclassical popular comedy (Le Père Noël est une ordure/Santa Claus is a Stinker [Jean-Marie Poiré, 1982], among others) but also taking in (post-)New Wave auteur fare from directors such as Jean-Luc Godard or Bruno Dumont, though they anticipate the contemporary intensely postnational moment, include representations of Frenchness that address international audiences. The difference in recent decades is more likely to reside in the degree of intention behind this aspect of their identity-construction. Put simply, many earlier films resonated with international audiences, while many recent ones are constructed with this market more directly in mind—even if extremely rarely at the expense of domestic viewers.¹ My present concern, however, is not with cinema at all but with the recent explosion in widely internationally circulated French (and by extension other nationally originated) television, which is by nature postnational because it ‘[re]introduces the national for external use’, in the first place simply by making audiovisual fictions produced within national contexts much more widely available elsewhere. It is noteworthy, then, that Elsaesser’s contextualisation of ImpersoNation engages with Benedict Anderson’s (1991 [1983]) theorisation of nation in terms of a community imagined through media, only to stake out the distance between this conceptualisation of (colonial and postcolonial) nation-building through top–down discourses circulated by print media and the altogether more difficult to pin down work of cinema produced by commercial actors in conjunction with creative personnel. Instead, argues Elsaesser, ‘Anderson’s scheme would be more likely to apply to television than to the cinema’ (2005, 53–54). Yet the television described here preceded the advent of so-called not-television, as Charlotte Brunsdon (2018, 21) pithily dubs it to suggest the cinematic parentage of quality, long-form series (her early example is The Wire [HBO, 2002–2008]), and which are now increasingly consumed on-demand and postnationally. This raises questions about the role of on-screen mechanisms for ‘reintroduc[ing] the national’ in television now available on streaming platforms. More specifically, does postnational television exploit the same strategies of ImpersoNation Elsaesser finds in the cinema from which it at least partially descends, and from which it is in fact increasingly inseparable?²

This chapter will take as a test case for this line of enquiry two recent French series by one highly regarded screenwriter shown on Netflix, Dix pour cent/Call My Agent! (France Télévisions/Netflix, 2015–2020) and Drôle/Standing Up (Netflix, 2022), both scripted by Fanny Herrero. I suggest that we do see schizophrenic cultural ImpersoNation, involving contrasting caricatures of Frenchness akin to those pinpointed by Chion, in French television distributed by international streaming platforms, and even across the œuvre of one influential creative practitioner alone. To this end, the analysis that follows is attentive to notions of televisual enworlding, which I argue is achieved to a limited extent through language (as a form of audience design [Bell 1984]) but even more so spatialised on-screen milieu construction, comprising a critical vector for the construction of social identities, where details such as ethnicity, class, age, gender and so on intersect with geographical affiliations. Not only that, but it will ultimately be argued that at times the type of ImpersoNation in evidence in these audiovisual fictions can be productively dubbed ImPosture, since it does not merely offer elements connoting nation but articulates a fictionalised version of Frenchness for external consumption that fairly directly contravenes observable realities. This in turn raises ideological questions about whether such a commercially embedded gesture should be interpreted merely in terms of cynical self-promotion or whether, instead, the potential to generate new psycho-social possibilities by widening legitimised representations of French identities emerges from reading for Frenchness as ImPosture.

Streaming Frenchness: New Spaces, New Speech?

The choice of fictions whose analysis forms the basis of this chapter is informed partly by their visibility but more particularly by the typicality of Dix pour cent and Drôle within the trends in representing Frenchness proposed in this chapter. To illustrate the first point, a snapshot of those fictions regularly cited in online lists of ‘[best] French-language series available on streaming platforms’ at the time of writing in 2022 is likely to include shows such as (in addition to those under discussion) the Netflix-distributed Lupin (2021–), Plan cœur/The Hookup Plan (2018–2022), Au service de la France/A Very Secret Service (Arte/Netflix, 2015–2018) and La Révolution (2020), as well as elsewhere Le Bureau des légendes/The Bureau (Canal+, 2015–), Engrenages/Spiral (Canal+/BBC, 2005–2020) and Maison close (‘Brothel’) (Canal+, 2010–2013). Meanwhile, Versailles (Canal+/Netflix, 2015–2018) and Emily in Paris (Netflix, 2020–) stand out among popular and so culturally impactful non-French-produced series set in the Hexagon (more specifically, in and around Paris). These broadly conform to the extremes of refinement versus vulgarity that screen representations of France have a history of promulgating, with the first tendency dominating.³ Thus, the ‘Anglo-Saxon’—and English-language—perspective on France offered by Emily in Paris and (almost parodically) Versailles most obviously constructs elegant visions of French architectural and sartorial splendour in the upper echelons of society of different periods (the world of international prestige brand marketing and the French court, respectively). Plan cœur and Au service de la France, while not set in milieux that are opulent to the extent of Versailles or the world of luxury commerce, present well-heeled, upper-middle-class characters associated in the first place with twenty-first-century hedonistic cultures and in the second with 1960s chic. A romcom about 20- and 30-something Parisians, Plan cœur ostentatiously makes the most of the tourist cityscape in terms of location shooting, even if its modernity renders its dialogue a little less soutenu [formal] than in Au service de la France, approximating Chion’s ‘familiar’ category rather than his fully working-class [populaire] one (Chion 2008, 9), including many common abbreviations and other idioms, in particular Anglicisms—as you might expect from a series produced by Netflix and focused on ‘global’ metropolitan elites. Spy comedy Au service de la France, for its part, joins contemporary-focused spy drama Le Bureau des légendes in a rather specific fetishisation of office spaces: unlike with the classic spy films epitomised by the global James Bond franchise and sent up in France by the twenty-first-century OSS117 series, exotic locations are quite sparse compared to grey interior spaces delineated and divided along the hard lines that dictate human instrumentalisation but also have geo-cultural resonance for their connotation of Franco-European bureaucracy. Language in each case is generally formal, even if the space retains elements characterised both by visible wealth and power and by shabbiness, especially in Au service de la France as part of its satire on the failing French secret service. This is also true, but differently, of Lupin, Maison close and La Révolution. The first, a vehicle for the performer Omar Sy to incarnate a modern avatar of the eponymous literary detective of the French popular children’s canon, extensively exploits high-end tourist locations but also intermittent tastes of the ‘underworld’. This duality is narratively justified by the protagonist’s background as a second-generation Senegalese immigrant who grew up in the grand household where his father worked as a domestic servant but can now fit in anywhere; in Episode 1 alone, he frequents the Louvre as both moneyed auction guest and cleaner who enters by the back door. Dramas Maison close and La Révolution are both heritage productions set at the end of the eighteenth century. Having in common with Lupin a thematic interest in classed performance, the first probes beneath the spectacle of glamorous allure adopted by female sex workers in a Parisian brothel to reveal the tawdry realities of their existence. La Révolution, as you would expect from its subject matter, plays centrally with similar class oppositions, opening as it means to continue with the visit of a countess to the squalid cells of a prison. Dialogue in all these, meanwhile, remains on the whole soutenu, even if some colloquialisms appear here and there in Lupin, as befits the series’s slickly contemporary setting but also crime scenarios, which see villains and (often indistinguishable) policemen deploy words long infused with a ‘street’ aura, such as pognon for money. Indeed, in this list, only the full polar or police procedural drama Engrenages is more fully rooted in the seedy world of criminals and Parisian law enforcement, including many banlieue settings and accordingly extensively slangy dialogue (alongside professional language, including legal jargon). On the other hand, a striking number of films on streaming services also fall into the banlieue genre (Grodner 2020; Pettersen 2023) that showcases ‘ugly […] run-down [and] desolate’ spaces (Vincendeau 2005, 23) and is animated by its ‘own language, [the French reverse-slang] verlan’, with a ‘declamatory, raucous musical quality to the intonation of young banlieue inhabitants’ (2005, 26) originally seen and heard in global critical and commercial hit La Haine/Hate (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995), and so reflecting an illustrious history on the silver (rather than small) screen. These include Divines (Houda Benyamina, 2016), Banlieusards/Street Flow (Kery James and Leïla Sy, 2019) and La Vie scolaire/School Life (Mehdi Idid and Grand Corps Malade, 2019) on Netflix alone. Such an observation highlights the fact that the phenomena examined in these pages have extended from cinema into television, broadly defined, rather than series generally supplanting the work of films.⁴

This is an apt point at which to highlight the recurrence of the French capital in all these representations, as in Dix pour cent and Drôle. As Alastair Phillips and Ginette Vincendeau remind us, being the ‘official’ birthplace of cinema and one of the most frequently filmed and iconic cities, as well as the site that inspired the notion of flânerie that became so central to modernist understanding of both city planning and cinema as part and parcel of this, ‘Paris is the cinematic city par excellence’ (2018, 1). Brunsdon (2018, 24–64), among others, extends this work by according cultural significance to Paris on the small screen even before the era of convergence culture’s ‘not-television’ television phenomenon. The important point is that Paris is a much-represented city and as such the on-screen metropolis comprises a heavily fantasised space, able to signify through multifarious connotations recognisable almost all over the world. Banlieue narratives are but one development within this history—the paradoxical way in which this apparently architecturally mundane or else Brutalist landscape has been aestheticised speaks to the long tradition of capacious and varied romantic-poetic visions of man-made urbanity within which Paris holds pride of place. In this sense, the contrasting Parisian settings of Dix pour cent—taking place principally in the first arrondissement—and Drôle—whose central locus is the north-eastern arrondissements (including the one-time suburb of Ménilmontant) but which also takes frequent sorties to the southern suburb of Morsang-sur-Orge, as well as some upscale, more central Parisian locations—are inherently critically significant within this historiography of representation.

In addition, there is no doubt that Dix pour cent is one of the most talked about French television series of recent years, perhaps second only to Lupin. Its international success is reflected by various remakes, including so far versions in India and Turkey (with rumours of another forthcoming in South Korea), as well as a recent BBC-distributed iteration whose failure to find an audience only suggests the virtuosity, not to mention important French-specificity, of the original. Dix pour cent also stakes a claim to being one of the first cases of a French audiovisual property for which a kind of auteur has become synonymous with the global branding figure of the showrunner in scriptwriter Herrero, widely touted as the main creative inspiration behind this series about the show business world in which she herself has worked for many years. That Herrero also scripted Drôle meant it was much anticipated, certainly at home but also to some extent internationally—even if largely circumstantial reasons (connected to Netflix’s profits dipping since the pandemic and amid international economic downturns) have led to its foreshortening after one nonetheless critically lauded season. Together these series represent, then, important narratives of postnational French televisual identity, while we shall see that the contrasting social worlds they construct recommend them as focal points for examining the way in which strategies of ImpersoNation, to the fore in Dix pour cent, can tip over into ImPosture, notably in Drôle.

Commodifying Glamour in Dix pour cent

The original idea for Dix pour cent, which is set in and around a talent agency for star film actors and personnel in the rue Saint-Honoré and features real stars and actors playing themselves, came from producer Dominique Besnehard, himself formerly an agent. It was first considered by the increasingly internationally oriented Canal+ a few years before being produced by Mother Production for France 2, then recommissioned by Netflix as an ‘original’ production after the success of its first season; the streaming platform now distributes the entire series, comprising four seasons of six 48–67-minute episodes. As the last chapter in this volume records, Harold Valentin, joining the production team after Besnehard and with an Anglo background on his mother’s side, was also an important figure in the series’s journey from concept to realisation, not least in bringing the influence of the show Extras (BBC/HBO, 2005–2007) to bear on its design. Further, Valentin notes that the office comedy format was a universal one, as was the topic of stardom. In sum, despite originally being shown on a domestic channel, Dix pour cent’s production context was always transnational and a postnational audience can never have been far from the minds of creators.⁵

This impetus extends to ImpersoNating Frenchness in a number of ways, among which the most obvious concerns its creation of a glamorous Parisian world. Embedded stage and screen performances recur in French cinema, with explicit examples abounding from the work of Jean Renoir and Jacques Prévert to the Nouvelle Vague or offerings from more recent auteurs, such as Agnès Varda’s documentaries about filmmaking or Abdellatif Kechiche’s theatrical cinema. Moreover, as Stephen Gundle shows in his elucidation of ‘the enduring glamour of the Parisienne’, Paris’s legend depicts the city as ‘imbued with a special vocation for female performance’ (2018, 167). While Dix pour cent features stars of both gender, 14 of the 25 who lend their name to an episode title are female (five out of seven in S01, when production decisions were more firmly in French hands before the Netflix acquisition/recommission) and the star cast also leans towards the feminine. At first, aspiring agent Camille (Fanny Sidney) and later her boss Andréa (Camille Cottin) are arguably narratively situated as the primary identification figures. Further important roles in the action are played by agent Arlette (Liliane Rovère), as well as support staff Noémie (Laure Calamy), Sofia (Stéfi Celma) and the highly feminised gay character Hervé (Nicolas Maury)—alongside the heterosexual males: self-effacing Gabriel (Grégory Montel), struggling on the whole successfully to be a new man, the less reconstructed senior agent Mathias (Thibault de Montalembert) and, from midway through Season 2, London-based international multimillionaire businessman CEO Hicham (Assaad Bouab). The agents are hardly less performers than the film stars, adopting a gallery of expedient professional demeanours with aplomb, while both Sofia and Hervé later become actors themselves. The character of Camille is also embedded particularly firmly in this seam of French representational history, when we consider that Gundle highlights French Cancan (Jean Renoir, 1955), and its tale of an ordinary young woman, Nini, who comes to Paris to become a theatrical star, as typical of narratives that erect Paris as a site of enormous possibility. This is almost the exact trajectory followed by Camille as Dick Whittington-esque ingénue, the everyman figure who launches the first episode by coming to Paris in search of her fortune—‘to try my luck’, as she puts it in the fairy-tale vernacular—via her previously somewhat long-lost father, Mathias (who was and still is married to someone other than Camille’s mother and so has kept her existence a secret).⁶ Camille’s arc throughout the series in achieving her dream of becoming an agent herself echoes Nini’s, underscoring the mythic allure of Dix pour cent’s Paris as a hub of fortune in the performing arts.

Similarly, a glamorous look characterises not only the series’s on-set sequences but also its ‘everyday’ set-ups, as extravagant and sumptuous decors and costumes feature alongside the more pared-down and modern but nonetheless quite imposing professional spaces and the carefully put together outfits of Andréa, Mathias and, increasingly, Noémie in particular. Indeed, its credit sequence foregrounds the continuities between these spheres of luxury sartorial consumer culture. Here, graphic matches juxtapose close-ups showing Versailles-era silken buckle-shoes, a powder-blue gown in taffeta, chiffon and lace and an elaborate wig and baroque jewellery being removed with, firstly, a shot of the same actress, now in jeans and Converse trainers, exiting the shoot, then another woman’s pair of legs in a flattering dark, knee-length A-line skirt and black patent high heels. These pick up the stride—or rather, an elegant catwalk-style gait—from the previous shot, now on a dark carpet that is revealed by subsequent overhead shots to be located in the offices of the talent agency ASK, around which the action revolves. No hint here, then, of the drab or even low-budget aesthetic of the offices of Le Bureau des légendes, with its flimsy partitions (at least until S04 when ASK’s near ruin is figured spatially by the legal team having to move to the same floor as the agents); the production team may attest to having wanted to offer a different view of the French capital from the extreme caricature of Emily in Paris (see the discussion in the last chapter of this volume), and there are certainly a few slightly ‘grittier’ elements here, yet close attention suggests similarities are as plentiful as differences (see Fig. 1).

Fig. 1

Gritty elements do little to obscure the essentially glamorous backdrop of Dix pour cent (S01/E03)

Notably, outside the office, characters frequent extremely upscale restaurants and cafés, including a local one bedecked with dark red velvet upholstery and other finery (in E01, a wide-eyed Camille reacts to the venue, where she meets Mathias, by commenting that ‘It’s chic here’ and mistaking the coffee sugar for a lollipop). Meanwhile, industry events, and especially the Cannes Film Festival—where Juliette Binoche is memorably styled in an impractical skin-tight white feather dress—remind viewers of the close interpenetration of the fashion and entertainment industries. The fact that Binoche trips over in her dress and describes it as resembling a dead swan is nonetheless typical of ImpersoNation that redeploys, while explicitly citing, questioning or in this case openly mocking, clichés of national identity (chic Frenchness and the Parisienne in particular as an effortlessly ‘elegant high fashion woman’ [Rearick in Gundle 2018, 169]). In this example, as during the credits, Dix pour cent purports to get behind the smoke and mirrors; yet the ‘unadorned’ scene beneath—a good-looking actress in skinny jeans; glamorous, high-end places of work; Juliette Binoche on a bad hair day—still appears pretty fabulous. Thus, ImpersoNation pokes fun at clichés while not abjuring them.

Anne Kaftal’s chapter in this volume also discusses the figure of the Parisienne in Dix pour cent, teasing out how Cottin’s star persona shapes and is shaped by her role as Andréa in ways that address domestic and international audiences differently but in both cases with reference to the stereotype. In fact, her analysis points to an updating of the figure through initially more locally recognisable franchouillardise or the inclusion in comedy of ‘typically French and folksy’ elements generally used to ‘gently mock’ the mores of French people. ImpersoNation, then, has a special place in French comic tradition, and what is more Kaftal links it to the informal language that (she notes) Chion has already identified with French comedy throughout film history. Andréa’s modern Parisienne reflects the cliché that French women—and Parisians in general—can be irritable: hence her tendency to swear when faced with even small inconveniences. Revealingly, the initially meek and well-spoken Camille too adopts this habit as she increasingly integrates into the series’s world and walks in Andréa’s shoes, a detail to which the show draws distancing attention when another character, new recruit Elise Formain (Anne Marivin), suggests the junior agent put her energies into being persuasive with talent rather than swearing over obstacles. While elegant refinement and bawdy verbal diarrhoea might appear rather antithetical, in fact I suggest the Parisienne type can comfortably accommodate both when we consider Gundle’s estimation that glamour always blends ‘class and [also] sleaze’ (Gundle 2008, 15), or the kind of behaviour that guardians of moral authority have seen ‘improper’ language to symptomatise. The dyad of class and sleaze also sums up both Andréa’s sexualised incarnation of lesbian chic (her high libido, pick-up artist techniques and callous partner-shuffling are repeatedly stressed) and indeed the series’s world as a whole. In linguistic terms, exaggerated foul-mouthing off (to coin a phrase) sits cheek by jowl with the elegant lexicon employed by most actors on set and many even off it. This clash is underlined when Julie Gayet, playing an aristocratic woman in a heritage production, accuses Joey Starr, in the role of her servant lover, of lacking ‘delicacy, elegance and finesse’ [un peu de pudeur, d’élégance et d’esprit] and when he suggests she goes back to society dinners, she tells him to articulate more clearly, before they both insult each other with the vulgar slurs connasse and connard [‘bitch’ and ‘asshole’] (S01/E05)! Likewise, the glittering show business world that ASK inhabits is characterised by shady dealings, ruthlessly self-serving backstabbing and Machiavellian conspiracies among agents, which undergird most of the plot contortions. The class–sleaze dialectic maps onto the paradoxical space of performance and authenticity the show as a whole inhabits so effectively, with a number of further attendant oppositions feeding into this pseudo-binaristic mode of self-articulation. For instance, echoing comments by Valentin recorded in this book’s final chapter that set Andréa in opposition to traditionally more intellectual French protagonists because she embodies a more frank iteration of the identity, Season 1, Episode 2 pits Nouvelle Vague veteran actor Françoise Fabian against popular musical star and AIDS activist Line Renaud as putative rivals over a role, having Renaud grudgingly call Fabian ‘smart’ and (therefore) ‘the Frenchwoman par excellence’, while Fabian describes Renaud with the more backhanded compliment, ‘she’s in every French heart’. It is noteworthy that in the end, both women are cast in the film in question. Of course, the lofty intellectual versus well-liked and down-to-earth binary equally plays into a dialogue between high (especially auteurist and cinephilic) and more mainstream cultures that we have already seen informs Dix pour cent’s positioning, particularly through Herrero as auteur-showrunner, and that equally recurs in its storyline, sometimes overlapping with generational clashes. Thus senior screen actor François Berléand is nonplussed to be cast in a play by a trendy new interactive ‘experiential’ theatre director (S01/E06); Andréa misses a trick in devalorising highly popular television star Mimie Mathy, only to lose her to rival company StarMédia (S04/E01); and at the Season 3 finale’s office party an old-timer cannot believe Andréa has never heard of classical film stars Martine Carol and Bella Darvi (S03/E06). Meanwhile the mise-en-scène often winks to classic cinephile viewers, for example by featuring the poster for Le Diable au corps/Devil in the Flesh (Claude Autant-Lara, 1947), about overwhelming physical passion, during a scene in which Gabriel and Sofia’s attraction for one another becomes irresistible (S02/E05). At the same time, this love intrigue equally works as a standalone node of light entertainment for another group of (presumably mainly younger) viewers.

This example speaks to the status of Dix pour cent as, among other things, a story of workplace romance. While quite routine in a US context where work encroaches into all walks of the middle-class life typically focalised by on-screen romance, this development retains novelty within the archetype of French/Parisian romance (itself another national cliché), even as it feeds into the trend that has seen French fictionalised narratives of work in general proliferating in recent years (Lane 2020, 2–3). The latter phenomenon is certainly attributable to the erosion by global neoliberal capitalism of spaces outside economies of labour and exchange even in relatively left-leaning France. Making work take over characters’ lives—also repeatedly acknowledged by dialogue in Dix pour cent—has the advantage of creating a complex tissue of plot threads linked to multiple characters while limiting a great deal of shooting to studio sets. Thus, in between intermittent exterior shots of the office and its rue de Rivoli surroundings under whose famous arches the show’s four main agents are filmed stalking in slow motion at the close of the credits sequence, and although it is filmed in the single-camera style associated with contemporary quality television, much of the series’s action is redolent of a traditional US sitcom.

Yet by the very same token, Dix pour cent simultaneously evokes the style of theatre popular in eighteenth-century France and built upon characters’ entrances onto and exits from the stage, stoking dramatic ironies, masquerades, cases of mistaken identity and other sources of conflict. Associated especially with Pierre de Marivaux, this style of mise-en-scène boasts a legacy in French cinema from Eric Rohmer to many contemporary romcoms or the work of the aforementioned Kechiche. Such a comparison foregrounds the extent to which—like many televisual dramas and many studio-filmed Hollywood comedies—Dix pour cent creates its own professionalised world as something of a huis clos, replete with glass panes as well as windows through which comings and goings ‘outside’ in off-screen space are frequently reported by onlooking characters and sometimes act as plot motors. This insularity certainly applies at the level of nation, since despite frequent (mostly negative) evocations of Los Angeles, New York and London, the show never strays beyond the Hexagon or often outside Paris, certainly when it comes to location shooting—Cannes is constructed almost exclusively through interior or geographically non-specific outdoor shots. But ASK and the world of its clients and business partners or rivals centred around the office set are also presented as, in the words of Mathias, ‘all of Paris’ (S01/E01, when he claims he has introduced Camille to this notional group): it is a synecdoche of a synecdoche, ASK standing in for the capital that stands in for the nation-state. This is most self-consciously achieved in Season 1, Episode 4 when Arlette likens the threat of takeover by a German company to the 1940 invasion of France. From this angle, part of the textual work achieved by Dix pour cent is to take the model of ‘family’ as a unit of national reproduction and reframe it—and so Frenchness itself —as an organisation openly dedicated to capitalist labour: ASK is repeatedly referred to in familial terms (though ironically so when Mathias invokes these following the birth of Andréa’s baby on the office reception floor in order to try to dissuade colleagues from pursuing a clandestine plan to start their own agency), with its clients infantilised, while Andréa’s partner Colette accuses the agent of substituting ‘la grande famille du cinéma’ [‘the great family of cinema’], a common phrase, for their own family unit during a row. At the end of the series, tellingly, the key narrative thread dealing with Camille’s integration as a Parisienne is resolved not through Mathias recognising her as his child, as they have discussed, but by the pair’s decision to start an agency together instead. On the other hand, the series’s ending does not completely follow through on promoting the ideological move to enshrine work as the meaning of identity, national and beyond, in that in a contrastingly re-traditionalising gesture, in the wake of ASK’s insolvency, the once ruthless businesswoman Andréa appears set to become a stay-at-home mother.

The ‘ordinariness’ of the lives of young to middle-aged professionals depicted in Dix pour cent invites comparison with Henri Lefebvre’s discussions of space in his Critique of Everyday Life. Everyday life occurs at ‘the intersection of the sector man controls and the sector he does not control’ (1991 [1947], 21), where biological rhythms collide with social ones in spaces that after the mid-twentieth century had become entirely colonised by capitalism. Even within the comedy format of Dix pour cent, there are hints at the violent demands exerted by the neoliberal workplace on its foot soldiers, such as in a sequence in which workers consume coffee to excess, set to a Wild West musical motif that casts the battleground of the capitalist war machine as North American while also celebrating neoliberal resilience (S01/E03). The space of the wider consumer-commercial city is also intimately bound up with flows of power (i.e. capital) in Season 3, Episode 4 when prolific actor Huppert is double-booked and whisked by an ASK-employed car from one shoot to the other, exerting mastery over the urban traffic network as a means to control the currency of the star body. Yet the show is intermittently aware of those excluded from these economies. It is marked by (tokenistic) ‘woke’ politics (see Gray 2019) in including a gay and a Black character in its cast, Hervé and Sofia apparently both proving notable hits with audiences (see the final chapter in this volume). As mentioned, these two have the possibility of acting careers before them at the end of the series, in something of a utopian resolution. However, most characters are White and middle class, not to mention unusually (though not totally implausibly) attractive, and all are able-bodied. More strikingly in the French context, the only key beur actor is Bouab in the role of Hicham Janowski; yet it is arguable that his specific ethnic difference is tempered—and rendered more familiar to US viewers—by being cast as implicitly Jewish, as Janowski is a Polish Jewish name. In another meta-significatory gesture, the exclusion of beur identities on screen is condemned by Camille: when her client Sami (Soufiane Gerrab) is fired because, in the words of Mathias, ‘he doesn’t know how things are done’ (in his quasi-Bourdieusian phrase, ‘il a pas les codes’), she berates her father for racism and promises Sami that the road ahead is ‘big and [it’s] wide open’. Her vow’s veracity is in fact affirmed by the comic finale that sees Sami probably rehired when senior actor Gérard Lanvin takes him back under his wing (just as Gerrab has come to international visibility through a major role in Lupin). However, audiences would have to wait for Herrero’s follow-up series to see both a leading role tailored to a latter-generation North African Frenchman and capitalism more explicitly questioned, although not totally repudiated, as a social goal.

Standing Up for Multicultural France

An overarching argument Chion (2008) puts forward in his study of French film dialogue is that the nation’s cinema is unusually fond of thematising linguistic proficiency as a form of social currency, as in the case of the Cyrano de Bergerac story to which his book’s title alludes. While the protagonists of Dix pour cent certainly manipulate words, usually as a vehicle for rhetoric if not deceit to achieve their professional and personal goals, in Drôle verbal mastery takes centre stage, initially as a vector for worldly success but increasingly as the series progresses simply as a communicative end in itself. The theatrical metaphor is apposite for the subject matter of its six (40–49-minute) episodes: the lives of a group of aspiring stand-up comics. However, Drôle does not fit easily into the mould of language polarised along class lines we find more traditionally on French-language screens. Although its principal male lead, Nezir (Younes Boucif), fits the banlieue protagonist stereotype in being the cash-strapped son of an Algerian immigrant who lives in cramped housing in the urban periphery surrounded by drug dealers and listens to rap music, unlike in banlieue narratives from La Haine to Engrenages or, to cite a more recent example, A l’abordage/All Hands on Deck (Guillaume Brac, 2020, featuring teenage boys from La Courneuve on holiday in the south of France), his otherness in relation to ‘Franco-French’ metropolitan and sometimes bourgeois identities is not linguistically marked. Rather, Nezir’s speech is elegant, off stage and especially on it, where for instance he muses: ‘Moi, quand j’invite une fille au restaurant et qu’elle refuse … bénef! […] Moi, si vous voulez, très clairement, mes moyens avec les filles c’est ma tchatche, mon humour, ma répartie. Quand la peur m’enlève ces moyens, que me reste-t-il?’ [‘When I invite a girl to a restaurant and she says no … bonus! […] You see, my best features when it comes to girls are my chat, my humour, my repartee. When fear robs me of those, what do I have left?’] (E03 ‘Black Goes with Everything’). Nezir’s French is perfectly correct, with the inversion of the verb and noun in the interrogative que me reste-t-il? even conveying marked formality (while bénef, abbreviating a French variant on ‘benefit’, and the Anglicism tchatche are more colloquial but very common); the actor’s strikingly clearly articulated, slow diction and careful pronunciation are also amplified by his character’s on-stage microphone.

What are we to make of this? Explanations might well include Herrero’s (and potentially Boucif’s) own lack of ease in ‘banlieue-speak’, and a desire not to travesty it, perhaps intersecting with valid questions over the extent to which this really exists at all. Certainly, it has been exaggerated in cinema; residents of banlieues took umbrage specifically at what they perceived as the inauthentic language they heard in La Haine, and which Vincendeau has pointed out overuses certain slang words likely to be easily recognisable to broad publics (2005, 84, 26)—principally in France but, we can assume, to a lesser extent outsiders who might have some linguistic knowledge. With postnationalism in mind, it seems even cannier for producers to simply stick to standard French, even better an intermittently soigné version, yet one enlivened by idioms contributing to an impression of vaguely hip but wholly mainstream ‘youth speak’.⁷

I would nevertheless like to advance a further explanation for the change in language design in evidence in this (partial) banlieue story, or at least an analysis of its effects, linked to the manipulation of real pro-filmic spaces into a fantasy on-screen world in Drôle. A defining trait of banlieue films is their tendency to stage trips to Paris intra muros to underline oppositions between the two spaces and the failure of banlieue youths to fit in within the metropolis (Konstantarakos 1999, 162). Drôle opens by showing two ‘immigrant’ characters’ incursion into the urban centre. The first is the almost comically diminutive and bespectacled but heavily moustachioed child-man Nezir, riding a delivery company’s bicycle down Haussmannian boulevards rehearsing his sketch to himself. The second is Aïssatou (Mariama Gueye), a statuesque Black woman, who asks if she can put up posters for her act in various increasingly downmarket shops and business premises, sometimes with her young daughter under her arm, not always successfully. It is evident that these are characters on the lower rungs of capitalist society and their status as temporary occupants of (if not intruders into) the spaces they frequent is signalled: Nezir is there by virtue of belonging to the service economy, Aïssatou through chutzpah that is at times rewarded with an invitation to leave the way she came in. However, there is no sense of hostility or hopelessness; although Nezir references his poor living conditions and impecuniousness, he is smiling as he deftly navigates a Paris of modern-looking, colourful urban spaces in the sunshine, reclaiming the time demanded by the labour market to simultaneously work on his own craft, while the last shot of indefatigable Aïssatou’s odyssey shows how, through sheer force of charm, she persuades an initially reluctant retailer to accept her poster. Thus, both characters evidence class mobility in their ability to dominate the modern metropolis, and notably by using language—the benefits of a Republican education—to recreate their worlds.

The opening sequence is more generally typical of Drôle’s attitude to ImpersoNating Frenchness via the clichéd history of representing (sub)urban working-class characters in postclassical realist drama: it flirts with stereotypes while ‘updating’ these by suppressing class difference—including through the original US associations of stand-up comedy itself (down to the French term being the identical Anglicism, le stand-up). Remaining with the central–periphery dynamics, we do see Nezir asleep on his grey-toned RER commuter train home and later in the film the convention is acknowledged in one of his sketches about a budding romance with bourgeois Apolline (Elsa Guedj), who lives in the sixth arrondissement: ‘I was Cinderella. I needed to get my train home before midnight or I’d turn into a homeless person.’ However, unlike in more classic ImpersoNation (for instance, Scotland as a deprived land of uneducated ne’er-do-wells in Trainspotting), the ironic distance from stereotypes of marginal working-class youth implied by this phrase is in the case of Drôle overwhelmingly maintained by the mise-en-scène. Nezir’s home, Morsang-sur-Orge, while not without vestiges of the now hackneyed scenes first mass-exported on screen by La Haine via the drug-dealing youths, is depicted as down-at-heel but pleasantly rural, drawing on ‘quiet banlieue’ representations that are beginning to multiply and combat the pre-existing caricature (Vincendeau 2018, 93–95). Even the drug dealers have their civic use, as Nezir purchases cannabis from them to medicate his father’s chronic spinal pain following a life of manual labour (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2

Drôle’s suburban scenes eschew the bleak iconography and affects associated with most prominent post-1980s representations of the banlieue as such (E01)

Equally, while the series focalises a multi-ethnic group of friends and professional associates, including as well as Nezir and Aïssatou the second-generation Vietnamese Etienne, known as Bling, and Nezir’s White love interest Apolline, only Nezir actually lives in the banlieue (the already quite successful Bling’s apartment, while shot to obscure specific localising markers, can be discerned through close scrutiny to sit halfway down the rue St Maur in the eleventh arrondissement; Aïssatou’s is more difficult to place as it is shot from the inside). As suggested earlier, most of the action unfolds in north-eastern Paris, in and around Belleville, where Bling’s comedy club Drôle is also located on the rue de Mont-Louis, and neighbouring Ménilmontant: an intermediary between the grand architecture of the central quarters and the emptier spaces of the banlieues, in the process of being gentrified as bohemian (see Clerical 2013) but typified by the influence of multiple cultures in Paris intra muros, such as the many ‘ethnic’ restaurants seen in night-time jaunts by the main characters. If Dix pour cent purported to popularise a fresh view of Paris postnationally, Drôle is surely better designed to achieve this goal, updating historical folkloric portrayals of working-class Paris seen abundantly in 1930s Poetic Realist cinema through a celebratory multicultural lens.

The exception concerns Apolline’s domain, which unapologetically ImpersoNates French high culture. Her parents live (at first with her) in a grand wood-panelled, high-ceilinged apartment bedecked with finery and where classical music constantly plays. That they have forced Apolline into studying History of Art and set her up with an apprenticeship at fine art and antiques dealer Christie’s in London, despite her damp enthusiasm for the topic, suggests the series’s negative view of this social stratum: hence, Apolline’s mother, while elegantly dressed, turns out to be oppressively mentally unstable and her father frequently absent on business. Still, self-consciousness about the caricatured nature of the depiction also tempers any value judgements to a degree; thus, when Apolline reveals her old-fashioned and undeniably upper-class name on introducing herself during a stand-up routine, the audience takes it as the first joke!⁸ Moreover, the key function of Apolline’s distinction from other characters concerns Drôle’s status as an inter-class, inter-ethnic dyadic romantic comedy, where difference works to allow reconciliation. Romcoms often feature elements of comedian comedy, perhaps especially in France, where it is an exceptionally significant cultural channel, among other things for minority ethnic performers to attain A-list stardom. Vincendeau (2015, building on observations by Nelly Quemener) and Jonathan Ervine (2019, 96–128) have shown the importance of theatrical and televised stand-up, especially Canal+’s Jamel Comedy Club (2006–), in establishing multi-ethnic comic stars in France.⁹ Several performers in this tradition have gone on to enjoy extremely successful film careers, including in addition to Debbouze, Gad Elmaleh, Dany Boon and most recently Sy. However, the title of the Netflix Elmaleh vehicle Huge in France (2019) underlines the fact that, while Netflix is beginning to try to exploit French stand-up (the UK offering includes a series dedicated to the performer Fary, who also plays a lead role in the platform’s Tout simplement noir/Simply Black [John Wax and Jean-Paul Zadi, 2020], and a 53-minute routine by Fadily Camara), it is only recently that any such performers have become at all widely recognisable beyond the Hexagon, thanks still fairly exclusively to Sy’s trajectory. And Sy’s truly worldwide fame has in fact been cemented not by only his international hit film Intouchables/Untouchable (Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano, 2011) but—as both the Introduction and David Pettersen’s contribution to this collection detail—by his role in Lupin.¹⁰ Drôle is arguably to be credited for attempting to extend this phenomenon (even if the ultimate ideal would be a level of diversity and visibility of roles for such performers that we are still far from attaining)—or rather, reorient it slightly differently, in that the performers in Drôle are actors playing stand-up comics. Further, just as Sy’s protagonist ‘Lupin’ is able to use amassed cultural capital including performative virtuosity to penetrate the corrupt and decadent upper echelons of society, so too it is Nezir’s talent as a comic that cements Apolline’s desire for him, beginning when he teaches her how to structure jokes. This leads Apolline to credit him with enabling her moderate revolt against her parents, by occupying her own attic room in the apartment building (though this is owned, it is implied, by her family), refusing to go to London and insisting on pursuing stand-up. Since language does not provide a key to characters’ class backgrounds in Drôle, the many sequences the series dedicates to filming stand-up routines reduce characters if not quite to a wholly disempowered Agambenian bare life then at least to just another name on the billing offering themselves up vulnerably to the mercy of a demanding public, with their isolation against dark, largely monochrome backgrounds evoking a zero degree of identity-construction. Going further, in a frank reversal of a stereotype so widespread it is a source of conflict in recent French fictions as varied Il a déjà tes yeux/He Even Has Your Eyes (Lucien Jean-Baptiste, 2016, distributed by Netflix and giving rise to an eponymous spin-off television series available in Belgium and France) and Leïla Simani’s 2016 Goncourt Prize-winning novel Chanson douce/Lullaby, White Apolline also works as Black Aïssatou’s nanny—but only briefly and informally. Likewise, while she does visit Nezir’s home turf once, declaring in a comic routine performed there, ‘I’ve always dreamed of being in the banlieue’, it is in her space that their relationship as lovers actually plays out, suggesting Nezir’s successful attainment of metropolitan upper-middle-class status (even if hiccoughs caused by Apolline’s mother’s ill health challenge their utopia temporarily, before the series’s final image of her, when she turns up after his show, suggests its restitution may be on the cards). In other words, just as language displays few if any markers of class in Drôle, the otherness of working-class ‘colour’ is in the end altogether reassuringly contained by the narrative.

Drôle is self-aware about the naivety of such a representation. On one occasion, Apolline’s mother mistakes Nezir for an Uber driver, and he goes along with it to avoid social awkwardness; on another, confronted with the horrific story of his younger brother’s death by falling from a tower block roof, Apolline blithely asks why they didn’t simply move house to escape the scene of the tragedy; and he repeatedly blanches at her obliviousness about the cost of everything, including another room she rents on inherited dime. Nonetheless, the approach it adopts presents certain drawbacks for any drive to level up representational economies. I have already hinted at the commercial underpinnings of the series’s desire to present a different view of Paris, arguably marketing a modern-day version of the ‘postcolonial exotic’ (Huggan 2001), while Netflix’s ‘inclusive’ casting policy is also clearly a strategy to optimise their products’ resonance with different ethnic communities.¹¹ If in Dix pour cent discourses of collective enterprise and family are hijacked by neoliberal logics, then in Drôle this extends to social justice imperatives (i.e. diversity initiatives) themselves. Kristen J. Warner (2017) has also famously critiqued the politics of ‘woke’ identifiable with many mainstream representations for their superficiality in ways that chime with Netflix’s insistence on diversity box-ticking: she takes to task the way in which ‘[s]wapping in and out racial groups with little adjustment to the parts themselves retains the original work as the primary driver and as a result marks the changes as superficial’. Drôle doesn’t quite do this but nor does it follow through on its premises when it comes to marking social differences, ultimately collapsing these in favour of elevating the fairy-tale integration plot to the status of key narrative motor. And in attributing a certain superficiality to the series’s diversity of characterisation, it becomes pertinent to note Jodi Melamed’s (2006) persuasive account of how ‘neoliberal multiculturalism’ can be integrated into national identities themselves in the era of advanced capitalism.

Jacqueline Ballantine (2021, 153–155) has meanwhile identified nostalgia as limiting the power of mixed-race romcoms to change perceptions—here, to normalise French mixed-race, cross-class couples for a domestic and international audience—because they set their central couples outside history.¹² Such an affective mode is clearly courted by this series’s tale of charismatic ordinary people at times displaying overtly anti-capitalist attitudes. Nezir’s cheerful simpleton father stands out here: unable to use a mobile phone, he spends his time happily watching cooking programmes, engages in slapstick physical comedy and tells his son that ‘[m]oney’s not the most important thing in life’—a lesson Nezir takes to heart when he implausibly foregoes the opportunity to earn €400 per minute writing content for his TV presenter boss and takes a stand against the latter’s unethical behaviour by feeding him plagiarised lines to embarrass him on air (referencing similar incidents involving well-known French comedians, notably Gad Elmaleh). Leading to the protagonist’s summary dismissal and industry blacklisting, this plotline conforms to transculturally recognisable narrative archetypes valorising humble self-sacrifice for moral good with a long history in Judeo-Christian thought and beyond.

In contrast, the symbolically named Bling represents the corrupting force of advanced capitalism, becoming complacent, hedonistic and bigoted (even if he too is ultimately fleshed out, while choosing a French name for his real first name, Etienne, speaks of a desire for realism about the complexity of immigrant identities, rather than xenophobic clichés). Yet we have already seen that the counterposed ‘feminist antiaspirationalism’ (Hagelin and Silverman 2018) embodied by Apolline—who wants to stay in Paris and ‘ride a bike’ after being banned from taking her driving exams due to a suspension from university for cheating—does not hold up.¹³ The series is clearer-sighted about this when it comes to Aïssatou’s arc. Her comic routine is by far the most socially engaged and so politically controversial, as she discusses her experience of harassment by racist police following an innocent shopping trip (subverting the trope of criminal banlieue youth perpetuated by the Black girls who do shoplift in the mass-exported film Bande de filles/Girlhood [Céline Sciamma, 2014]). However, her White manager warns her stridently against this course of action and sure enough, noting some hesitation in reactions to it among her growing and increasingly lucrative fanbase, she returns to the less overtly political terrain of body comedy, more often associated with women performers and indeed closely resembling the sketches of Jamel Comedy Club graduate Blanche Gardin. Such a development tacitly acknowledges the utopianism of Nezir’s and Apolline’s storylines—in other words, the fact that depicting France as a post-racial society in which people from all backgrounds speak elegant French and princesses marry paupers falsifies realities along Republican universalist lines to the point of constructing an ImPosture of national identity.¹⁴

How are we to interpret the move in Herrero’s work from the innovative yet firmly historically rooted self-caricature of Dix pour cent to the more distinctly novel and even utopian but still self-aware posture of Frenchness adopted by Drôle? There has been some debate over the ideological value of irony in representation. Many theorists attribute to the mode political force as a means of trying to engage with the world, in a situation where all politics could be seen as ironic ‘because it requires an acceptance of the pretense, the possible fiction, that living together matters in the face of death’ (Seery 1990, 10). However, when it comes to racialised comedy that at once recognises clichés and yet partially reproduces them in French stand-up, sociologist Quemener takes the view that the social engagement of such discourse is ‘often dispersed in favour of easy laughs’ (2012, 124). Sometimes the routines engaged in by performers in Drôle fall into precisely the sort of ethnic self-othering Quemener is referring to. Thus, while shy ‘Arab’ Nezir—like Aïssatou’s Black partner Vlad—is reassuringly feminised, he nevertheless recounts his father’s inability to do domestic work; or, more extremely, East Asian Bling describes and graphically mimes a pornographic scene in which a submissive woman eats rice (S01/E01).¹⁵ Such negative images of immigrants are surely grist to the mill for the view that ‘brands should be held to account for attempting to market themselves as being concerned with issues of inequality and social injustice (“woke-washing”), including in ways that involve stereotypical representations’ (Sobande 2020, 2740). Likewise, when it comes to the central issue in Drôle of the difficulties for marginalised subjects of negotiating their place in a contemporary French nation still beset by social prejudice, we have seen that the series’s narrative tends not even to hold these up in inverted commas so much as try to wish them away, in a fashion that sceptics of ‘woke’ have also begun to criticise (see John McWhorter in Doubek et al. 2021). On the other hand, Francesca Sobande’s strongest critique is reserved for organisations that make no contribution to addressing inequality, whereas the casting of ethnic minority actors and less often other personnel has concrete economic benefits. Moreover, on the question of fictionalised identities, rather than offering easy laughs, narrative irony pertains to and mitigates even both the sometimes (excessively negative) stereotyped individual identities and the sometimes (excessively positive) clichéd individual story arcs represented nonetheless. This is because other aspects of Drôle’s plot, characterisation and iconography more implicitly recognise that structural inequities endure. It is worth pointing out that the overall intentions of the series’s creators here are elusive and perhaps immaterial (in both senses of the word), harking back to the way in which many thinkers in the domains of both genre and especially ironic address have understood meaning-making as a dynamic rooted in often unconscious cultural structures and beliefs circulating between creators and audiences.

I suggest that in inevitably calling attention to its status as a fairy-tale, Drôle invites us to understand the riches-to-rags ideology it intermittently promotes as a kind of performative gesture. If posture describes a stance adopted in physical space, (Im)Posture here describes leaning (or perhaps ‘standing up’) into an idealised vision of what France might look like. Opened up by irony, this space transcends the structural constrictions of everyday life, having more in common with the radically inclusive notion of ‘thirdspace’ developed by Lefebvre’s successor Edward Soja: a conception informed by an acknowledgement that the built environment (‘firstspace’)—for instance, the French capital’s layout, including its peripheral banlieue—can produce new material realities, such as the kind of cross-cultural interpersonal dynamic that exists between Apolline and Nezir (Soja 1996). For Soja this occurs through the intervention of ‘secondspace’, described as the realm in which firstspace is conceptualised, and it is tempting to attribute this status to on-screen fictional worlds, and in this instance that of Drôle specifically. In any case, the narrative’s slippages, aporias and contradictions mean that Drôle offers more than a naive celebration of national assimilationist policies, even if the points of contact with these may resonate with domestic audiences. In a situation where the imagination remains one of the only spheres potentially outside the circuits of self-reproducing edifices of neoliberal power that shore up economic disparities and attendant social divides, performativity seems overall as positive a response as may be possible to the injunction to offer a ‘legitimate’ view of contemporary Frenchness beyond fetishised views of limited strata. It is worth citing here the positive influence of the Netflix acquisition of Dix pour cent on domestic network France Télévisions’s viewing figures, as acknowledged in this collection’s final chapter, to remind us of the bilateral nature of any negotiation of identities in postnational audiovisual production. The important implication of this observation is that imagining Frenchness in ways that play well internationally ultimately shifts norms of national identity from the motherboard, so that for all their capitalist underpinnings, postnational platforms may offer spaces for challenging entrenched fear of difference in France.