National and Postnational Femininity in Engrenages: The Limits of Empowerment

Abstract

The French police series Engrenages/Spiral (eight seasons, 2005–2020) achieved international recognition for its ‘gritty’ realism, its attention to the idiosyncrasies of the French criminal justice system and especially for featuring women in the two lead roles: detective Laure Berthaud (Caroline Proust) and lawyer Joséphine Karlsson (Audrey Fleurot). This chapter explores the two women’s contrasting trajectories, their different attitudes to work ethics and sexuality and the inscription of bodily trauma (motherhood for Laure, rape for Joséphine) on their screen identities. The analysis demonstrates that despite their ostensibly empowered roles, the two female protagonists embody conservative concepts of femininity. It is argued that this sexual stereotyping, alongside a lack of racial diversity, ultimately maintains the series within a national tradition and has limited its postnational reach.

The police series Engrenages/Spiral was the first internationally successful French television crime series. The eight seasons, from 2005 to 2020, were exported to a multitude of countries and drew critical acclaim and awards, notably the Globes de Cristal in France and an International Emmy in 2015, while internet users’ comments on IMDb and Allocine.fr attest to its popular appeal.¹ Initially produced by Son et Lumière and backed by Canal+, Engrenages soon gained international exposure. The BBC distributed the series from 2006 onwards (BBC4 co-produced Seasons 4 and 5), and it was acquired by the Netflix catalogue in 2012—Le Monde saluting the latter accolade as ‘Finally, the “French touch” is bankable!’ (‘F.B.’ 2012).² Throughout the 86 episodes, we follow the ‘2e DPJ’, a unit in the Parisian Police Judiciaire (the equivalent of the UK’s CID) led by Laure Berthaud (Caroline Proust), with two principal male assistants, Gilles Escoffier, aka Gilou (Thierry Godard) and Luc Fromentin, aka Tintin (Fred Bianconi), and a few other regulars, including JP (Jean-Pierre Colombi), Tom (Lionel Erdogan) and Nico (Kija King). Reflecting the institutional closeness between the police and the judiciary in France, another set of central characters is drawn from the legal professions, principally barrister Joséphine Karlsson (Audrey Fleurot), examining magistrate François Roban (Philippe Duclos) and prosecutor—barrister from Season 3—Pierre Clément (Grégory Fitoussi). Each season has an overarching theme (such as drugs, serial killers or terrorism) linked to groups of characters who subsequently vanish; each episode typically includes two or three subplots in which the recurrent central characters are also involved.

Engrenages presents itself and is widely appreciated as a ‘realistic’ police series in which crime solving is used to expose social and institutional dysfunction. At the same time, a major focus is on the close ties between the characters, primarily Laure and her team, their family and amorous entanglements, as well as their complicated relationships with the legal staff and rival police departments. In the process, Engrenages showcases the idiosyncrasies of the national criminal justice system. Indeed, scholars have been drawn to the specificity of the series in this respect (Wallace 2014; Villez 2016), while this pedagogic value has been noted by internet users. Of particular interest to this chapter, though, is the fact that the head of the police unit, Laure, and the main barrister, Joséphine, are women, the series thereby raising questions about the representation of female professionals in crime series and the contours of exportable French femininity. Of the two, Laure is undeniably the lead character in screen time, underlined by the musical score, a point to some extent obscured a posteriori by the fact that Audrey Fleurot has pursued a more visible international screen career.³ Nevertheless, both women as a pair play a major structural role in Engrenages: under the dense grid of characters and events typical of ‘complex television’ (Mittell 2015) and the often self-contradictory individual trajectories, a long arch of moral polarity between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ emerges, channelled through their parallel and yet contrasting trajectories. This crime series thus includes a strong melodramatic streak, not an unusual combination as Linda Williams has shown in her book on The Wire (2014), one of the inspirations for Engrenages.

After a brief examination of the series’s major representational trope, its much-vaunted ‘realism’, this chapter explores how gender, filtered through the moral polarities inherited from melodrama and the intersection of work and sexuality, contributes to the generic identity of Engrenages as well as its French specificity within the national-international-postnational spectrum.

Grit and Glamour: A ‘Realist’ Series?

Stylistically, Engrenages is rooted in realist (melo)drama. In the 2012 ‘Engrenages/Spiral Dossier’, which covers the first four seasons, Janet McCabe sees the series as an heir to naturalist literature, in particular ‘the novels of Émile Zola [which] explored the bleak harshness of life, such as poverty, violence, prejudice, corruption and prostitution, with a pervasive pessimism’ (102). The original title Engrenages, which refers to the notion of being caught in an inescapable set of events or vicious circles, indeed evokes Zola’s fatalistic chronicle of French societal woes, updated to early twenty-first-century Paris and its banlieues (suburbs). As in The Wire (HBO, 2002–2008) or the Danish series Forbrydelsen/The Killing (DR1, 2007–2012), ‘At the end, the crime is solved […] But the moral and social problems that produced the crime are still with us’ (Pinedo 2021, 43).

Concurrently, the close relationship between the makers of the series and the institutions it portrays is frequently invoked as a badge of authenticity. The show was conceived by Alexandra Clert, a trained criminal lawyer, co-written by a policeman under a pseudonym and supervised by lawyers and a former investigating judge. Actors were made to observe real policemen, judges and lawyers to copy their gestures and professional slang; plotlines are frequently drawn from real-life cases (Séry 2010; Engrenages podcast 2019).⁴ The fact that most of the actors came from the theatre and were initially unknown to the audience has also been cited as enhancing their plausibility (Cauhapé and Séry 2009; Séry 2010). Another dimension of the series’s perceived realism refers to its graphic violence. Here, Engrenages conforms to global trends as it routinely incorporates violent beatings, autopsies and mutilated corpses (insistently in Season 1, more discreetly later, allegedly as a response to negative comments), a feature seen to raise it above the national: ‘Like Anglo-Saxon TV shows […] this new French fiction establishes a tone, a narration and a script that are strikingly more radical than their [French] rivals,’ singling out The Wire as a model (Fraissard 2005). The disparaged French counter-models are the gentler, and very popular, indigenous crime series such as PJ (France 2, 1997–2009), Navarro (TF1, 1989–2006) and Julie Lescaut (TF1, 1992–2014). Compared to these sedate series where crime tends to be solved through ‘reasoning and human relations’ rather than violent action, aiming to bring female spectators to the crime genre (Beylot and Sellier 2004, loc. 2478), Engrenages, broadcast on the pay-channel Canal+, clearly aimed at a younger, more male-oriented, cosmopolitan, audience—as confirmed by internet commentators. On Allocine.fr, the main French film news and reviews platform, the ‘noir’ or ‘sordid’ [glauque] topics and mise-en-scène are celebrated. On the US-based, more international IMDb, terms such as ‘gripping’, ‘gritty’ and ‘grim’ are bandied about approvingly. Additionally, for international IMDb commentators, the gritty world of Engrenages leads to a different perception of French identity, the ‘general scruffiness’ seen as countering ‘our stereotype of the French as always chic and elegant’.⁵

Echoing declarations by the writing and filming team, the representation of Paris and its banlieues is also singled out by internet commentators as central to the realism of the series: Engrenages ‘avoids romantic Paris’ and shows ‘the harsh reality of Paris’, its ‘underside’ (Engrenages podcast 2019, ep. 3). A majority of scenes take place in the north-eastern, less affluent, though gentrifying, arrondissements of Paris, the tenth, eleventh, twelfth, eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth, corresponding to the remit of the 2e DPJ in real life. We repeatedly roam the populous, narrow streets of busy working-class areas, small flats and dingy hotels, the emblematic aerial Métro thundering above, the desolate banks of the Canal de l’Ourcq at La Villette and the underpasses of the boulevards des Maréchaux. The inner Paris locations extend to the north-eastern suburbs of the Seine-Saint-Denis département (referred to by its postcode 93, or 9-3), home to a large immigrant population and pockets of the worst poverty in the country. While this geo-social anchorage runs through the entire series, Season 6 turns it into its ostensible subject with an inquiry into the gruesome death of a young police officer who worked in the fictional town of Cléry-sous-bois. This moniker is a transparent pseudonym for the real Clichy-sous-bois, the notorious banlieue where the death of two young men fleeing the police, Bouna Traore and Zyed Benna, led to three weeks of violent riots in the suburbs of Paris and major French cities in October–November 2005. The investigation covers a range of criminal characters and activities as well as municipal and police corruption that are presented as inherent to such ‘difficult’ banlieues. Although Laure’s office in that season and her mobile phone screen saver sport a poster of glamorous Alain Delon in the classic Jean-Pierre Melville film Un flic/A Cop (1972), the depicted milieu is legible to contemporary audiences through the internationally distributed film de banlieue and especially Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (1995) and its avatars, which popularised a narrow, yet influential, visual and oral grammar of run-down blocks of flats and recurrent conflicts between multiracial male youth and the police (Higbee 2013; Tarr 2005; Vincendeau 2005, 2018). The ordinary, ‘quiet banlieue’ of modest individual houses (pavillons) is occasionally glimpsed, but it remains marginal to the violent action scenes, which are mostly located in high-rise estates—locations typically associated with drug dealers.

The dominant, working-class/dysfunctional, habitat of Engrenages is however contrasted, throughout the series, with its spatial and sociological opposite through views of iconic ‘high-end’ Paris. Rooftop vistas of the capital punctuated by landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower, the Sacré-Coeur and the Opéra Garnier recur as transitions, sporadically but sufficiently to orientate the viewer. The Palais de Justice (Law Courts) on the Ile de la Cité provides a narratively justified glamorous counter-location, with outside, historic buildings and the banks of the Seine and, inside, grand rooms with lofty ceilings, marble floors and wood-panelled tribunals.⁶ Glamour and opulence are thus seen as intrinsic to the judiciary. Joséphine works on avenue de l’Opéra in S01 and later, when Pierre baulks at the rental price for their new office, she tells him that an address near the Champs-Elysées is sine qua non (S03/E04). Similarly, when crimes do not take place among the poor or the underworld, they are mostly located among the upper classes: powerful businessmen and politicians (S01), an upper-class adolescent dealing drugs at his posh lycée (S02), a grand-bourgeois gay escort in the Marais (S06), a high-flying Libyan businessman (S05), luxury hotels (S07) and so on. Such developments provide pretexts for the display of magnificent apartments, expensive furniture and designer clothes. Judge Roban finds proof of a banlieue mayor’s corruption by literally stripping his wife of her Chanel suit and Prada shoes (S03/E07). Thus the series inhabits the extremes of the French social spectrum rather than the statistically larger centre, and the representation of the city echoes this divide spatially. Despite aiming to promote a ‘non-touristic Paris’ and offer innovative images of poor areas, Alexandra Clert acknowledged that, as Miami Vice did for Miami, the aim was ‘to sell Paris’ (Engrenages podcast 2019, ep. 3). As a result, images fall back on the familiar visual grammar of French cinema exported to international audiences, at both the luxury and underworld ends.

The ‘realism’ of Engrenages exhibits an equally awkward tension when it comes to racial stereotyping despite frequent invocations of deriving cases from real life and praise for the series’s depiction of socially relevant issues such as drugs (S02), undocumented migrants (S04) and delinquent Moroccan adolescents in the eighteenth arrondissement (S08). Be that as it may, under Engrenages’s multitude of plots, subplots and characters lie stark racial stereotypes: White cops fight racialised criminals. There are a few non-White members of the police team but they are either recurrent but marginal (Nico) or important but short-lived, such as Sami (Samir Boitard) in Seasons 2 and 4 and Ali (Tewfik Jallab) in Seasons 7 and 8. And one or two isolated scenes denounce racism: when Sami joins the team (S02/E04), he is treated like a criminal before they realise he is a new colleague. Similarly, Ali sardonically points out that he is asked to infiltrate a banlieue drug network because his Maghrebi origins make him ‘plausible’ (S07/E03). But these are fleeting moments. On the judiciary side, Judge Carole Mendy (Fatou N’Diaye), a Black woman, appears in brief subplots in Seasons 4 and 5 and then vanishes, leaving the legal profession almost entirely White. Engrenages includes plenty of White offenders and yet, with one exception (the political terrorists of Season 4), the major narrative arcs feature ethnically marked criminals: Romanian (S01), Maghrebi (S02), Mexican (S03), Kurdish (S04), Black women (S05) and men (S06), Chinese (S07), Moroccan (S08).⁷ Moreover, such criminals are frequently presented in gangs or families: the most prominent Kurdish, Maghrebi and Black criminals appear as sets of brothers with extended families, reinforcing the impression of a dangerous racialised mass preying on the French White population.

As a result of the series’s narrative and stylistic choices outlined above, gender in Engrenages emerges as particularly complex and contradictory. The two lead roles being women undoubtedly generates interest and spectatorial appeal. Yet gender inversion in (traditionally male-oriented) crime series is no guarantee of progressiveness and, as Deborah Jermyn puts it, it no longer constitutes ‘novelty in itself’ (2017, 260). The fact that victims are mostly female and criminals mostly male echoes social reality, yet also draws on patriarchal stereotypes of vulnerable femininity and the gruesome spectacle of their bodies: Seasons 1, 3 and 5 start with mutilated female corpses and there are multiple images of and references to women being abused, beaten and raped.⁸ The series more generally includes myriad oppressed women, such as drug ‘mules’, trafficked women, go-go dancers and abused spouses—illustrating Barbara Klinger’s observation that ‘these stories’ strong female protagonists are frequently defined in relation to archaic specters of femininity’ (Klinger 2018, 531). Moreover, the exceptionality of Laure and Joséphine within their respective male-dominated milieus both precludes female solidarity and sets the scene for their central narrative function as arch enemies, structuring the whole series in this respect around another set of familiar sexist stereotypes.

Women at Work in Engrenages: Feminist Intervention or Feminised Utopia?

The centrality of Laure and Joséphine to Engrenages is often ascribed to the strong female presence in the series’s production team: the main showrunner is Alexandra Clert working with several women, including Anne Landois, who stated that ‘what interested [her] especially in Engrenages was the position of women within an ultra-violent world’ (Nurbel 2017). Yet we should be wary of ‘a feminist approach that attributes the production of female agency mainly to direct female creative control’ (Pinedo 2021, 53). Equally influential are global trends in the feminisation of crime genres (Beylot and Sellier 2004; Brey 2016; Laugier 2019; Toulza 2022) and earlier French popular crime and legal series centred on women, including, in addition to Julie Lescaut, Une femme d’honneur (‘A Woman of Honour’, TF1, 1996–2008) and Avocats et associés (‘Lawyers and Partners’, France 2, 1998–2010), all of which amply demonstrated the appeal of female leads in this erstwhile male-oriented genre and profession.⁹ However, as Geneviève Sellier points out, these French series were notable for offering ‘an acceptable and reassuring version of gender relations which did not challenge patriarchal domination’ (in Beylot and Sellier 2004, loc. 2419). The question thus arises as to whether Engrenages updates the earlier series beyond increased violence and international exposure, whether it significantly empowers its heroines. Promotional discourse regularly describes Laure and Joséphine as ‘powerful’, ‘furiously intelligent’ women who ‘contradict, in each episode, the archaic illusion of a “man’s world”’ (Engrenages podcast 2019, ep. 4), and Laure has been saluted in The Guardian as a ‘feminist anti-hero’ (Chrisafis 2011). I will first look at the two women’s physical styling and professional activities throughout the series, before moving on to the interaction of their sexuality with work, with the aim of assessing their degree of agency and empowerment beyond promotional discourse.

Laure ostensibly looks ‘ordinary’, which for an actress in screen fiction means little visible make-up, casual clothes and dishevelled hair. She routinely wears jeans, T-shirts and jackets in dark, muddy colours. She never carries a handbag, replacing this feminine accessory with the ultimate phallic symbol, the gun. From the beginning, reinforcing the gender inversion, her behaviour is tougher than that of her male colleagues: on several occasions they are physically sick at a particularly horrible crime scene, while she is not. In Season 4, Episode 5 she faces hostile hoods on her own as her male colleagues look on, hidden in a car, while in Season 3, Episode 12 she alone faces a vicious serial killer. Her unisex garb, fit for action, is designed to make her blend in with her male team (see Fig. 1).¹⁰ Recurring shots emphasise Laure’s unfashionably flared trousers, as she stomps around in heavy boots. The attire, gestures and behaviour spell professionalism and practicality, while playing down her sex appeal. Nevertheless, her T-shirts are clinging, open at the neck, sometimes low-cut and sometimes with thin shoulder straps, revealing her shapely torso. Hers is thus not a de-sexualised image but one in which sex appeal is half-hidden (literally under her jacket) and adapted to her job. Relevant too is her light-brown hair: cut short, gamine-style in Season 2, it is otherwise shoulder-length, held in a variety of untidy ponytails or plaits, denoting someone who has no time to waste on such trivial matters. In its ‘girliness’, Laure’s hairstyle also signifies youthful energy, while Proust’s soft facial features, short retroussé nose and large, round brown eyes exude a sense of openness and empathy, contributing to her character’s integrity and sincerity.

Fig. 1

Laure (Caroline Proust) blending in, and surrounded by her male team (Engrenages S06)

In stark contrast (see Fig. 2), Joséphine Karlsson, when not in barrister’s robes, wears body-hugging, expensive-looking dresses or skirts and tight sweaters that accentuate her hourglass figure. Her clothes’ deep, saturated colours match or offset her vivid blue eyes, bright lipstick and long, elaborately coiffed red hair. Stiletto heels, click-clacking on the marble floors of the Palais de Justice, and glamorous dresses, make-up and jewels in nightclub scenes complete the femme fatale look. Everything about Joséphine is bold, sharply defined and blatantly sexy. In Season 2, Episode 4, after earning a lot of (ill-gotten) cash, she goes on a shopping spree, comes home and preens in front of the mirror, in a moment of narcissistic pleasure that nevertheless seems destined for the male gaze. Her sex appeal defines her to the point of being narrativised, repeatedly commented/acted upon by colleagues and clients alike. The actress Audrey Fleurot argues that Joséphine’s ultra-feminine garb is a ‘shield’, a ‘masquerade’ (Engrenages podcast 2019, ep. 4). One might agree with her insofar as her outfits are excessive, almost caricatural, singling her out from the rest of the cast, but also because the thought evokes Joan Riviere’s theorisation of femininity as masquerade. In this foundational text for feminist theory written in 1929, Riviere argues that ‘womanliness therefore could be assumed and worn as a mask, both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if she was found to possess it’ (1986 [1929], 38). This reading, however, is contradicted by the fact that Joséphine’s ultra-feminine surface is revealed on many occasions to hide feminine vulnerability rather than masculine power. In their colourful artificiality, Joséphine’s looks also suggest the character’s dishonesty. Her time in prison up to her ‘down and out’ state when she comes out (S06/E12 to S07/E05) is marked by her dreary clothes and the absence of make-up. But as soon as she is better, that is back on aggressive professional form (S07/E07), colourful make-up and sexy garb reappear; from that point on she occasionally wears trousers, but they are very tight and paired with stiletto heels.

Fig. 2

The glamorous, eroticised Joséphine (Audrey Fleurot) is frequently isolated in the frame (S06)

The contrast in looks and grooming between Laure and Joséphine is reproduced in their attitude to work. Laure, who holds the middle rank of Capitaine and, from Season 6, Commandant, is a highly efficient, respected and trusted policewoman, who elicits a huge amount of admiration and sympathy, frequently reiterated by colleagues as well as Roban, himself presented as the most honourable Investigating Judge [Juge d’instruction]. The two reiterate their mutual sympathy and admiration at various points in the series, sharing its virtuous moral pole (see Fig. 3). Laure’s position within the hierarchy means that she is both head of a team¹¹ and subject to the authority of the Commissaire above her and with whom, typically within the genre, conflicts arise. However, such clashes are never about her capabilities, but about defying orders. Laure’s pugnacious attitude puts her in the category of the empathetic, ‘troubled female detective’ (McHugh 2018, 536) and ‘difficult woman’ (Pinedo 2021) of contemporary series: her rule-breaking derives from empathy or legitimate motives and is vindicated by results. In Season 2, for example, her spur-of-the-moment use of a truncheon to arrest a violent hoodlum leads to her being investigated by internal affairs and eventually suspended, yet her action, while technically illegal, is shown as legitimate self-defence against a vicious thug. Conversely, in one of many points of contrast between the two women, Joséphine’s manipulative defence of the same thug, while exploiting the letter of the law, is motivated by greed and the desire to harm Laure and the police in general. At the end of the season (S02/E08), when Laure retaliates to clear her name, her law-breaking method (threatening Joséphine with a recording of one of her illegal deeds) is justified as both righting an obvious wrong and exposing the lawyer’s duplicity. Many other examples could be cited of Laure’s upheld legitimacy even as she breaks rules, from her regularly covering Gilou’s misdemeanours to her shooting of serial killer Ronaldo Fuentes (Misha Arias De La Cantolla) in self-defence in Season 3, Episode 12. Her superiors, especially Herville (Nicolas Briançon, S04/S06) and Beckriche (Valentin Merlet, S06/S08), display initial hostility towards her independence and methods and both temporarily remove her from leading her team—yet they systematically end up recognising both their error and her competency. Laure’s consistently recognised abilities despite her ‘difficult woman’ status clearly updates the pre-2005 French series analysed by Sellier, where rightful transgression of the law as a mark of independence was a prerogative of male cops (in Beylot and Sellier 2004, loc. 2397). Laure’s consistent professional success, recognition and well-liked status in the eyes of her peers and superiors, while a source of spectatorial pleasure, nevertheless raise two types of issues for a feminist reading.

Fig. 3

Laure and Roban (Philippe Duclos) share the virtuous moral pole of Engrenages (S03)

The first is that, unlike, say, the female protagonist of canonical British police drama Prime Suspect (Granada, 1991–2006), the function of Laure as a character does not appear to be that of challenging ‘the entrenched sexism of the police’ (Brunsdon 2013, 376). Laure being the only woman of her rank is plausible, as women with the title of Capitaine or Commandant constitute less than a quarter of the workforce.¹² On the other hand, sexism within the French police in Engrenages appears miraculously absent, figuring only in tiny details: Laure has to chide Gilou and Tintin for giggling during the reconstruction of a rape with a female mannequin (S01/E07); knowing she is pregnant, Herville mocks her for being ‘hormonal’ (S05/E08).¹³ Significantly, virtually all examples of sexism and misogyny are located outside the police: criminals routinely direct sexist abuse at Laure (and Joséphine); in S01-E04, Tintin asks a criminal to show respect to Laure, adding ‘she’s my boss’, to which the hoodlum replies, ‘I would hate that’; a grossly sexist pathologist describes her as a ‘loose woman’ (S01/E06). Unsurprisingly, the absence of institutional sexism in the police in Engrenages contradicts its rampant presence in the real force, increasingly in evidence over the last 20 years or so. Journalistic reports of social media networks channelling racist, sexist and homophobic messages and condoning rape culture have appeared, while women have testified from the inside to widespread discrimination in the police and the army (Souid 2012; Miñano and Pascual 2014). I would suggest three reasons for this startling discrepancy in a series vaunted for its realism. First, one may surmise a bias in favour of the police linked to the presence of former members of the institution in the writing team, one reason also perhaps for the reported popularity of the series among policemen. Second, the wish not to alienate the largely young, male demographics of Canal+ viewers (McCabe 2012, 106) is likely. And third, we may note a wider indifference to gender issues among French audiences, suggested by commentaries on Allocine.fr, where the vanishingly low number of remarks about women concern Joséphine, either to praise Fleurot’s sex appeal or condemn Joséphine’s malevolent character. Commentaries on IMDb by contrast show greater awareness of gender issues, though none remark on the absence of sexism in the police. Laure’s deeply satisfying professional status as a valued and recognised policewoman among an all-male team thus in many ways belongs to a utopian vision of the French police.

The second issue concerning Laure’s and Joséphine’s professional practice is the degree to which their parallel narrative arcs are placed within a moral framework. As we saw, while Laure may be a ‘difficult woman’ and regularly breaks the rules, her integrity is never compromised. In a reverse mirror image, Joséphine is repeatedly portrayed as unprincipled, disloyal and greedy. While Laure is surrounded by flawed, yet ‘salt-of-the-earth’ male colleagues, Joséphine is drawn to sleazy male lawyers: Vincent Leroy (Vincent Winterhalter) in Season 1 and Szabo (Daniel Duval) in Seasons 2 and 3; she moreover regularly agrees to, or volunteers to perform, illegal acts for crooked clients such as Aziz (Reda Kateb) in Season 2 and Solignac (Philippe Jeusette) in Season 7, in order to earn large sums, frequently materialised as wads of notes in envelopes. Joséphine’s love of money functions as a leitmotiv: Szabo tells her, ‘to work with me you have to love money, and only money’ (S02/E04). A leading criminal she defends says, ‘You love money, don’t you,’ to which she replies, ‘Yes, so what!’ (S02/E07). Her professional and later personal relationship with the honourable Pierre Clément at first looks like heralding a change; yet she falls back on dishonest practice more than once, prompting him to tell her accusingly, ‘you love money’ (S03/E09). Pierre is killed in Season 5, before she can demonstrate a significant moral change. Indeed, later, her sleazy behaviour continues; she also attempts to murder a colleague and ends up in prison. Contrasting with the widespread respect for Laure, Joséphine is called ‘ruthless’, a ‘whore’, ‘a pitbull’ and ‘a carnivore’. In Season 7, Episode 12 Roban declares: ‘Your cynicism is boundless!’ While Laure fights to eradicate crime, Joséphine defends a gallery of disreputable or horrendous characters, not simply because it is her job but because it gives her pleasure: at the prospect of defending a serial killer, she exclaims, ‘A monster, exciting!’ (S03/E08). Even when money is not involved, bad behaviour is never far from the surface: at the end of Season 1, when Vincent Leroy is cleared of rape by his female accuser who is dying of cancer, Joséphine deliberately fails to tell him and she destroys the evidence (S01/E08). Not above obtaining forged documents (S03/E07), she discloses the names and photos of Laure and her team to her terrorist client, knowingly putting their lives in peril (S04/E05). After Joséphine comes out of prison homeless in Season 7, Laure gives her shelter in her flat; she repays her by leaking information glimpsed on Laure’s tablet and devises a Machiavellian scheme to trap Roban, almost bringing his and Laure’s careers to an end. And so on, until almost the end of the series. Laure’s unassuming decency and professional ethics are thus constantly contrasted with Joséphine’s flamboyant, ruthless drive to get results at all costs.

At first sight, the Laure–Joséphine moral polarity matches Charlotte Brunsdon’s distinction between second-wave (‘fuddy-duddy’) feminism and postfeminism: although Laure is not exactly one of these women who have ‘sacrificed their femininity and their niceness in their journey to the top’ (Brunsdon 2013, 385), she embodies a type of ‘no-nonsense’ feminism that aims at equality and camaraderie. By contrast, Joséphine fits within a ‘girly’ postfeminism marked by privilege, consumption and a form of ‘raunch culture’ (378). In this light, it is tempting to see her relentlessly bad behaviour as a form of ‘punk feminism’, a rebellion against patriarchal models of submissive femininity. In practice, however, although her ruthlessness earns her occasional victories in court, it ultimately brings her insults, failure and punishment rather than power and success. She is repeatedly humiliated by the crooks she defends, including being physically attacked by some. While Laure’s ethos is underpinned by professionalism and team loyalty, Joséphine’s is defined by corruption and individualism, a point visually underlined by the framing of the two women across the series: Laure is frequently seen in spaces surrounded by her team, Joséphine repeatedly isolated (see Fig. 2). Similarly, sexuality and motherhood, to which I now turn, interact with work in sharply contrasting parallel trajectories for the two women.

Female Sexuality in Engrenages: Body Matters

As a series about women invested in traditionally male jobs (police and the law), Engrenages inevitably narrativises the conflict between their professional and their personal life. In this respect too, Laure and Joséphine follow divergent parallel paths that both crystallise around traumatic bodily experiences. As Iris Brey points out, it is Laure’s body that ‘brings her back to the fact that she is a woman, that she is different from her colleagues’ (Engrenages podcast 2019, ep. 4) and the same is true of Joséphine. While both women are portrayed as sexually active (within an almost entirely heterosexual framework), Laure’s narrative takes her through motherhood, while Joséphine experiences rape.¹⁴

Season 1 introduces us to Laure as the ‘sexually free’ woman vaunted by Angélique Chrisafis (2011). In the opening scene of the first episode, she calls Pierre ‘hot’ and makes clear that she is attracted to him. They kiss and sleep together from Episode 3, although she claims it is ‘no big deal’ (S01/E04), and when their brief liaison is over, they remain good friends. Meanwhile, she sleeps with an interpreter (S01/E02) and flirts with a colleague (S01/E05), though later, when he harasses her, she threatens him with her gun and he is never seen again. Other brief sexual encounters are alluded to. And yet, except for a couple of misogynist remarks by unsympathetic, marginal characters (such as one of the pathologists), Laure is not denigrated as a promiscuous woman, confirming Proust’s view of her modernity in this respect: ‘She’s not a slut, she’s just a woman who obeys her desires in a very simple way’ (in Chrisafis 2011). The succession of guilt-free, one-night stands gives way, from Season 2 onwards, to more substantial liaisons with colleagues. First there is Sami, a relationship interrupted by the dramatic conclusion to that season: he almost dies and is posted elsewhere. Season 3 charts Laure’s liaison with Commissaire Brémont, a sexual attraction to which is added an ulterior motive (retrieving a compromising piece of evidence to protect Gilou [S03/E06]). In Season 4, Episode 4 she moves in with him. When Sami returns halfway through that season, she hesitates between the two men but Sami dies in a terrorist attack (S04/E12) and she is single throughout Season 5. Season 6 witnesses the sexual consummation of her close friendship with Gilou, her most significant male colleague, interrupted in Season 7 while he is in prison and reprised ‘for good’ at the end of Season 8, the conclusion to the entire series. Thus Laure’s sexual journey takes her from brief sexual encounters to monogamous coupledom, via short-lived affairs. Overlapping this conventional sexual/romantic journey is her trajectory towards motherhood.

From the start, Laure is ambivalent about children. Threatened with being barred from the police because of an internal affairs inquiry, she cries: ‘Christ, Gilou, I’m 34, no man, no kids, what do I do?’ (SE2/E03). For the internal affairs psychologist, she invents a desire for children, guessing this will make her look more ‘normal’, but later breaks down in tears, telling her, ‘I want impossible things’ (S02/E05). Yet, once she becomes pregnant (from her affair with Brémont), she immediately considers abortion. Told she cannot have one in France because she left it too late, she books a train to Amsterdam but renounces the trip at the last minute, ostensibly to pursue an inquiry (SE5/E04). Choice eludes her again when a violent knife attack induces the birth of her very premature baby girl, Romy, at the end of Season 5 (E12). Across Season 6, her visits to Romy in intensive care primarily show her alienation from the infant. Although she appears, gradually, to come to terms with motherhood, at the end of the season she runs away instead of taking her home, despite Gilou having offered to help bring up the child. At the beginning of Season 7, she is off work for severe depression but abbreviates her sick leave to get back to work. She eventually, slowly, bonds with the baby throughout Season 7, and at the end of Season 8 (and of the whole series) gives up police work in order to look after Romy, with Gilou as stepfather. This long-drawn-out subplot, interwoven with countless police enquiries, is of course typical of long-form television, working to create a series of cliffhangers. But Laure’s struggles with motherhood are also a way for Engrenages to scrutinise not only the work/motherhood interface but the mother herself, echoing Philippa Gates’s insight that ‘While a mystery surrounding a crime motivates the involvement of the female detective in these films, ultimately the mystery to solve is that of the detective’s place—both socially and professionally’ (2011, 257).

While Laure’s struggles to combine work with motherhood echo many women’s experience, Engrenages engages with them in essentialist rather than socially grounded terms. The discovery of Laure’s pregnancy at the beginning of Season 5 is graphically anchored in female bodily functions and, throughout that season, uncomfortably linked to violence against women. We see Laure in a bar picking up a man and taking him to her car for sex. As she undoes her trousers, she discovers a lot of blood and brutally sends the man away. A doctor tells her she is pregnant despite the blood.¹⁵ In the very next scene, a woman and her young daughter, from a bridge over the canal, spot the corpses of a mother and young daughter tied together, towed by a barge in the water (S05/E02). As if anticipating that she is pregnant with a girl, throughout that season Laure is shown to be particularly affected by the dead mother and daughter—echoing Kathleen McHugh’s observation about ‘the problematic conflation of the female detective with the usually female (or feminized) victim, what Lindsay Steenberg astutely terms forensic femininity’ (2018, 537; emphasis in original). In yet another echo of the mother–daughter dyad, the season’s finale involves the kidnapping of a little girl, along with the young woman looking after her. Unusually (in the series and statistically), the perpetrators of the kidnapping, and of the initial murder of the woman and her daughter, turn out to be a gang of adolescent girls. To nail the point further home, we learn that the leader of the group, Oz (Shirley Souagnon), was abandoned by her mother at a young age and it is the mother who helps the police track Oz down.¹⁶ Throughout Season 5, the overdetermined repetition of mother–daughter pairs from a variety of backgrounds and ethnic groups therefore stresses biological links over social circumstances. When Laure visits her premature daughter, her diffidence is contrasted with the ‘correct’ maternal behaviour displayed by nurses as well as by Brémont and his wife. On more than one occasion, Laure’s prioritising of work over visiting the baby is frowned upon; a nurse tells her, ‘a baby is more important than work’ (S06/E02). Later, using a familiar motif from the Hollywood maternal melodrama, in which a mother is made to feel guilty for her child’s illness or death in her absence, Laure arrives late when the baby, now staying with the father, has been rushed back into hospital (S07/E03).¹⁷ Everything ends well for the baby, but the disapproval of Laure’s behaviour is tangible. In the next episode, a female judge removes her custodial rights to her child.

Once Laure comes to terms with motherhood, Engrenages gives remarkably little consideration to the practicalities of looking after a baby while working as a policewoman. Throughout Season 8, she takes turns with Brémont to look after Romy, a process that appears entirely effortless, a matter of decanting the child amicably from one car to another and then cooing blissfully with her at home. The difficulties of reconciling work with motherhood that she foresaw (‘I want impossible things’) have miraculously vanished. Ultimately, Laure is united with Romy and Gilou, though the latter is not the father, while Brémont, Romy’s biological father, has another child with another woman, in addition to two adolescent daughters from an earlier relationship, the group forming a typical twenty-first-century famille recomposée. But under the veneer of modern family mores lurks a conservative vision of femininity. Already in Season 3, Episode 4, Gilou told Laure she needed ‘a man’, not just sex, just as Brémont wanted ‘more than sex’ from her (S03/E11), insisting she move in with him and his two daughters (S04/E04). An essentialist view of parenting confirmed by the series proving these suitors right is further reinforced by the contrasting trajectory of Tintin, who eventually loses his wife and children as he repeatedly fails to prioritise them over work. Laure’s move from sexual freedom and intense investment in work to romance and family life at the price of giving up work, thus follows a highly traditional gendered scenario.

Against Laure’s positive normative resolution, Joséphine’s trajectory continues to function as a reverse mirror image, marked by trauma, violence and loss, also anchored in the female body. In Season 4, we learn of her unhappy childhood: her mother was regularly beaten by her father and committed suicide after Joséphine told the police; ever since she has viscerally hated him. In a troubling move, a confrontation with her father at her sister’s wedding leads her to initiate rough sex with Pierre (S04/E04). Later in the same season, after Pierre, shocked by her unethical work practices, tells her their relationship is over, she slashes her wrists in the bath (S04/E09; she is saved in time by a neighbour). These associations between Joséphine, sex and violence culminate in her rape. The third episode of Season 6 opens with her collapsed on the banks of the Seine, groggy with her hair and clothes in disarray. She realises she has been raped after her drink was spiked at a party the night before, so does not know who the perpetrator is. She comes to Laure for comfort and advice, one of several brief and implausible rapprochements between the two women. This is followed by Joséphine changing her mind, twice—a behaviour consistent with her incoherent persona, marked by a series of U-turns (a point picked upon negatively by a few IMDb commentators: one queries why a ‘strong female lead has to be emotionally unbalanced’, while another ‘would rate the show higher if it wasn’t for Josephine’).¹⁸ At first she suspects her former colleague, barrister Eric Edelman (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing). When she finds out the rapist is another colleague, Jean-Etienne Vern (Sylvain Dieuaide), she rejects legal redress offered by Laure and decides instead to kill him.

The insertion of rape in the series is congruent with French social reality where, according to a 2018 report, 12 per cent of women surveyed said they had been raped (Morin 2018). It also aligns Engrenages with global screen trends, in which rape has become a recurrent motif in the construction of female characters, with a focus on the victim rather than the rapist. As Iris Brey puts it, ‘Above all the rapists are no longer depicted solely as monsters who loom in alleyways at night: they are boyfriends and husbands, work colleagues, step-fathers, the close entourage of the victim’ (2016, 148). However, the way Engrenages treats the aftermath of Joséphine’s rape through the trope of the rape-revenge movie locates the cause of her erratic and self-destructive behaviour not in the rape itself, nor in her traumatic childhood, but in what showrunner Anne Landois sees as her ‘pride’, designed to hide her fragility. Landois argues, ‘to expose this fragility means losing part of the whole image Joséphine built for herself and we thought it was inevitable that she would decide to avenge herself’ (Nurbel 2017). Landois’s narrative choices, however, not only reinforce Joséphine’s incoherent persona with her frequent changes of mind, they also make her the aggressor. Having found out that Vern is the rapist, first she perversely defends him in court when he is accused, all too plausibly, of sexual harassment by another female colleague, and in the process she publicly humiliates the woman (S06/E06). She then runs Vern over with his own car, but is denied the triumph of the avenger as he survives to denounce her. While he is in intensive care, she slips into his room and viciously squeezes his genitals as he lies helpless, covered in tubes (since the rape is left off screen, she is the one who visually attacks him). Meanwhile, a different plotline sees her relentlessly pursue Judge Roban in court, for a case about which, in a familiar motif, she is legally right but ethically wrong: she unnecessarily harasses a sympathetic character who is also a sick old man. The overall effect is that, while Joséphine is a true victim of male violence, she appears as the predator, thereby justifying her arrest and imprisonment for most of Season 7.

Joséphine to some extent succeeds in reconstructing her life after prison. She decides to specialise in rape cases, though this is limited to one case, in which she defends Lola (Isabel Aimé González-Sola), a beautiful young inmate she befriended in prison (S07/S08). Lola was raped by her stepfather but, in a clear echo of Joséphine’s attitude, refuses to appear as a victim, thereby endangering her own case. Joséphine has fallen in love with Lola, but the young woman rejects her both professionally (she demands another lawyer) and personally (she leaves her). This pattern of loss continues in Season 8, when she becomes attached to a delinquent Moroccan youth, Souleymane (Ayoube Barboucha), who is eventually killed—partly as a result of her own relentless fight against the police—and then to his young brother Youssef (Ahmed Azaoui), who is returned to his parents. Although in the last image of her in the series, she and Edelman are seen kissing, suggesting the formation of a couple, the loss of the two boys completes Joséphine’s repeated punishments—the father’s abuse of the mother and the latter’s suicide, Pierre’s death, her own suicide attempt, the rape, Lola’s departure. The series in this way confirms her powerlessness, epitomised by her cry to Edelman, ‘Why do we always want what we can’t have?’ (S08/E07).

Laure’s consistently upright behaviour has thus been rewarded with loyalty and love (to protect her, Gilou magnanimously goes to prison alone in Season 7 for a misconduct in which they are both implicated), as well as motherhood, while Joséphine’s innumerable misdemeanours meet retribution. Under the complex network of subplots of the long-form series, the simplicity of the polarised ethical codes that are attached to Laure and Joséphine creates the series’s melodramatic ‘moral legibility’ (Williams 2014, loc. 659; 1294). Although its appeal is deeply connected to the two female leads, Engrenages squarely adheres to the trend in which series that are distinguished by the prominent, autonomous roles they offer women protagonists seem to do it, as in the case of the US series Homeland, ‘at the price of a re-inscription in “classic” if not archaic concepts of femininity’ (Courcoux 2015, 95).

National, International, Postnational

If Engrenages was an extremely popular national series and for a while equally successful internationally, it appears that the gender formation discussed in this chapter has led to its failure to reach postnational status. Three years after the conclusion of the series, its absence from Netflix is noticeable. Some clues as to this situation can be found in viewers’ comments. An IMDb post entitled ‘Terrible representation through a 2021 lens’ suggests that the viewers’ gaze has changed, in tune with the massive cultural transformation that has taken place globally in terms of gender in the aftermath of the #MeToo movement in 2017.¹⁹ Some viewers give relatively low ratings to the series because of the frequent ‘violence against women’ and their repeated ‘objectification’. Another, ‘Lucyvanbaars’ (30 March 2022), says of the first season, ‘Maybe in 2005 when it came out it was more acceptable to continually objectify sexual violence against women.’ Returning to Sellier’s critique of the female detective in earlier French crime series as providing a ‘reassuring’ vision of femininity, it is noteworthy that while Engrenages updates Julie Lescaut and Une femme d’honneur in terms of Laure’s sexual activity and fearless involvement in tough physical action, it reproduces the earlier series’ apparent freedom from institutional sexism. Moreover, while Lescaut and the protagonist of Une femme d’honneur remain working mothers, Laure’s final retreat from work into motherhood is hardly innovative. Engrenages’s deployment of a baby as a happy resolution for a woman is found in other Gallic genres, such as romantic comedy (Harrod 2015) and the series Dix pour cent/Call My Agent! (2015–2020), in which the lesbian Andréa (Camille Cottin) leaves work to care for her baby, thus pointing to the French specificity of the formula. Similarly, the hyper-sexualisation and malevolence of Joséphine, combined with her trajectory marked by punishment and powerlessness, signals a classic demonisation of the sexually active, apparently strong, woman on screen. Figured as a garce [bitch] rather than the more powerful femme fatale, Joséphine pursues a long national tradition, going back to the French film noir of the 1930s to the 1950s (Vincendeau 2007; Burch and Sellier 2014) and which endures, as in Paul Verhoeven’s 2016 film Elle.

Beyond gender, another change in the viewers’ gaze is clearly at work, concerning race and intersectionality. It is noticeable that many recent French Netflix programmes, including Plan cœur/The Hookup Plan (2018–2022), Lupin (2021–), Drôle/Standing Up (2022) and En place/Represent (2023–), as well as the film Tout simplement noir/Simply Black (John Wax and Jean-Paul Zadi, 2020), all work towards racial and multicultural inclusivity. The ‘Terrible representation through a 2021 lens’ post also points out that in the first two seasons, ‘I think I’ve seen just three black actors so far’, and goes on to criticise their stereotypical roles. Another adds that in Engrenages, ‘Paris is full of criminals, mostly immigrants’, a perception which, as we have seen, is correct throughout the series. Since 2020 and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, there appears to be a growing desire among younger audiences for greater gender and sexual, but especially racial, diversity, which is met by the likes of Lupin, Drôle or Plan cœur. Engrenages remains a brilliant national and international crime series, but in the postnational era it seems already to belong to another age.