Class Act Review: Also known as Tapie owing to its titular focus on the French businessman, politician and TV host, Bernard Tapie, the new French limited Netflix series premiered on September 13, 2023. Laurent Lafitte takes on the eponymous main role, and alongside him Josephine Japy, Patrick d’Assumcao, Camille Chamoux, Antoine Reinartz, Hakim Jemili and others star in important roles.
Created by Tristan Seguela and Olivier Demangel, the TV show has 7 episodes running for almost an hour. It’s loosely based on real events, with creators having invested in fictionally fleshing out the dialogues between real life people who’ve now become characters on a screen.
Tapie Review Contains No Spoilers
Class Act Review: Discussion
The fictionalised biopic about Bernard Tapie, aka one of the most controversial French public figures, paints him as a relentless hard-working man from the working class. Tackling issues of class divide from a distance, the show mostly stays loyal to the fictional plot-driven narrative about its main character. Throughout the series, we see Lafitte’s character get sucked into the race of making something big out of nothing and over the time his high ambitious drive is exactly what turns out to be his fatal flaw.
In the initial episodes of the series, we see this man break up his then-existing family and marriage with his former wife and fall for another woman he met through one of his projects in the making. It’s then that Josephine Japy comes into the picture as Dominique. Class Act invests a lot of time in these first few episodes to depict the growing relationship of the two pivoted on their mutual ambitious zest.
In a way, both actors settle into their characters’ shoes satisfactorily, with the additional plus side of Lafitte even resembling Tapie a lot. However, it would be too much to expect a lot from them because, frankly, the series doesn’t put enough time into building them up as characters.
From the beginning to the end, it simply seems to serve the purpose of relaying a made-up version of Tapie’s life to us, and so the plot becomes everything. Certain moments try their all to portray the dysfunctional love-hate relationship shared between Tapie and his father, but that too doesn’t go the distance in keeping us invested and engrossed.
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Each episode depicts how Tapie dives headfirst into numerous projects, in the hopes of either of them taking off the ground. Ultimately, he’s left off with too much to handle on his plate, and while that may be the realistic vision of what happened to him too, the series also ends up dishing too much to the audience at once. Not once did I feel an inkling of emotion surge for Tapie’s character, and even though he’s a morally grey character, the show doesn’t work too well in the department of making him look like an interesting one.
It’s only during the last few episodes that multiple incidents revolving his life actually started to interest me. The whole exchange captured between him and the prosecutor did a lot more in pulling me closer to the screen with intent than the other episodes did. Unfortunately, that only makes for a short intervention in the otherwise 7-part series that kept throwing similar actions and events at Laurent Lafitte to make the most of, but just ended up looking like the same thing being played on a loop over and over.
However, that’s not to say that the series bores you out. It does stay above the ground in fairly entertaining you with the several bits of scandals and stories about Tapie’s life, and so something or the other is always in motion throughout the course of the series. But, one should also not take any of the information laid out in the show to heart because a lot of it has been fictionally tampered with. By the looks of it, the series pulls off the former years’ aesthetic charm of the French vision. From outfits, to hairstyles, buildings and even the other paraphernalia like vintage cars and more, the show’s production value stays visually rich.
Tapie Netflix Series: Final Thoughts
It’s a Laurent Lafitte show through and through, and the Netflix title doesn’t even try to introduce any other subplots with intriguing characters along the way to add more weight to its writing. It keeps up with its paced moving narrative, but characters don’t necessarily jump off the screen with any larger than life qualities to them. You can browse through this one for a one-time watch experience, but don’t expect much out of it as it won’t stay with you as a memorable watch after you’re done with it.
The Class Act Netflix series is now streaming on the OTT platform.
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