At last: a beloved-TV-show-to-film-spinoff that doesn’t suck! The original French series is a screwball-speed office comedy about a boutique Parisian talent agency, and was a ratings and critical success in its homeland when it started back in 2015. Its acquisition by Netflix grew the audience internationally and spawned a stable full of remakes across Europe and Asia. In the meantime, several members of the original French cast have become proper stars in their own right, especially Camille Cottin and Laure Calamy, and this sequel, set five years on, is smart to put these two at the heart of the latest instalment. And of course, there are the obligatory turns from properly famous actors playing themselves, including Laetitia Casta, Vincent Macaigne, Laurent Lafitte and some guy named George Clooney, best known these days for appearances on vaporettos in the Venice lagoon.
Like many great sitcoms, this one always understood that failure, rather than success, keeps the wider narrative arc more interesting and relatable. So the last episode of the series left the gang at talent agency ASK (which stood for Agence Samuel Kerr, after the founder, who died in the first episode), dispersed to new gigs and careers; the band, in effect, broke up. Five years on, the stars have aligned to bring them all back together to work on Andréa (Cottin) and Noémie’s (Calamy) new film project, so the title Call My Agent! The Movie works on more than one level.
