Plus belle la vie dans le New York Post

March 3 2009, at 12:00 AM
By Steven Erlanger
Copyright New York Times 2009
(Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

MARSEILLE, France — After years of struggling and study and success in several other cultural disciplines, the French have finally mastered the art of the television soap opera.

On a lavish set, with an intricate town square built around a cafe bar in Marseille, French public television churns out the most popular program on the screen — a nightly soap, “Plus Belle la Vie,” that is watched by nearly a fifth of the French population. Some 13 million people tune in at least once a week to follow the convoluted fates of various families in the multicultural confusion of Marseille, France’s second largest city.

There is the Marci family, which owns the Bar du Mistral; the Nassri family from Algeria; the Torres family from Spain; the Lesermans, whose matriarch survived the Holocaust and is a Communist; the wealthy Frémonts with their shady business dealings and lesbian daughter; the Chaumette family, transplanted from Paris; the Estèves, with their son, who divorced, has a daughter and loves a man; and the Castellis, who, as the show’s Web site says, are “living to forget the past.”

The interrelationships among these families — their disputes, love affairs, business dealings and tragedies — both transfix the French and educate them, at least a little, about cultural differences and social issues like racism, drugs, teenage pregnancy, Islam and homosexuality, even in the police.

Pascal Tomasini, the show’s co-producer, is especially proud that the show broadcast the first homosexual kiss on French television, more than four years ago now, and survived the uproar. “We’re not here to give lessons,” he said. “We’re not into moralizing. But we want to have situations from real life that happens to Monsieur et Madame Tout le Monde” — Mr. and Mrs. Everybody.

It is not just that the French watch the show, visit the Web site and buy copies of the clothes worn by the actors through a special division of a mail-order business. Or that 100,000 tourists come here every year, the city says, looking for the Place du Mistral, which does not actually exist. Even after the show shifted 10 minutes earlier from its 8:20 p.m. time slot in January — during the heart of the main national news broadcast — the French have stayed loyal. Some are even changing their dining habits, to make sure that they can catch the soap at its earlier time.

“Plus Belle la Vie,” which translates roughly as “Life Is So Sweet,” has shaken French evening television, which has traditionally been built around the 8 p.m. news on each channel, sometimes referred to as France’s Grand Mass. Despite conflicting with the main national newscasts, the soap has lost less than 2 percent of audience share.

As cable channels have proliferated, “Plus Belle la Vie” pulls in more viewers every night than any other channel except TF1, which shows the most watched news program. “People wanted an alternative to the Mass,” Mr. Tomasini said. “Young people choose their news.”

Mr. Tomasini and his co-producer, Hubert Besson, both 45, arrived at the beginning, part of an effort by France 3, considered a stodgy channel for older people, to find a younger audience. As a public channel, France 3 also wanted to produce a show in the regions, and Marseille, with its colorful past, reputation for crime, mixed population and temperate weather, seemed a perfect choice.

The show nearly failed. It began weightily in 2004, with heavily sociological plots. “It was good for the writers but boring for the public,” Mr. Tomasini said cheerfully. “So from episode 80, we threw away the screenplays and started again, more popular and with more crime.”

They decided to combine genres with three intersecting arcs of storytelling in each episode, using the multigenerational structure of each family. A story about the police or a social issue runs for about three months, and under that is a shorter police or social story that runs for about a month, and under that, a love story of some kind that helps to connect the others. Then, one of the monthlong tales becomes the larger, longer arc for the next three months. Each episode ends with a cliffhanger.

Michel Maffesoli, sociology professor at the Sorbonne, ties the show’s success to themes of Greek mythology. “People fall in and out of love, nothing is embellished, people are shown in their everyday life,” he said. “The show plays on the dark, evil side of things — crime, delinquency, multiple sexuality. It’s the first time in France we don’t fear showing that.”

The show is a small revolution here, he said: “It’s an interesting sign of the evolution of French society. France was afraid to show darkness. France is the country of the Enlightenment, and enlightenment means: what isn’t dark.”

To keep creativity and consistency, Mr. Tomasini adopted a practice from Hollywood: a team of 20 writers who create in workshops, producing carefully arced scripts. Mr. Besson said that the challenge was to produce a “soap à l’américaine” but “keep an identity of our own, speaking with an accent while communicating to all of France.”

The writers labor to stay current, Mr. Besson said, but all these interrelationships have produced another problem. “We always need new characters and new settings,” he said. “Everyone has already slept with everyone else and left everyone already — it requires a lot of imagination!” So the show has introduced yet another family, the Cassagnes, who are tied into the others through, naturally, a love affair.

One director, Roger Wielgus, who co-produced a 1989 movie with James Coburn, “Call From Space,” has made 200 episodes. “It’s impossible to keep them apart,” he said. “The stories never finish.”

Judging from the many e-mail messages and letters, the relationship to the French, especially parents and young people, is real. A letter from a young woman named Kelly is posted on a corkboard. “What bothers me most is that when I’m not a nice person, I can’t watch the series,” she wrote about a spat with her parents. “So I try to be the nicest possible.”