Guest post by Jim Miles: Call My Agent!

One of my jobs is teaching English at a language school in Cambridge. I have students varying in age from teenagers right up to retired adults, and from countries all over the world. This makes the work very interesting but naturally it can be quite tiring, especially when there is a rapid turnover of students requiring very different needs and lesson content/styles.

At the start of the year I had a French student whom I taught mostly 1-to-1 for 90 minutes per day, working on general fluency and training her for potentially taking the IELTS exam so that she can study at a UK university. Often 1-to-1 classes with the same student every day for weeks can become quite grindy and even exhausting, but with this student we had five weeks of such classes without it ever feeling like the format was wearing thin. I think one reason for this is that we had bonded over our mutual interest in Netflix shows and she recommended a few to me that I had even begun watching and discussing with her. The one that hooked me the most was Dix pour cent (literally, Ten Per Cent, titled Call My Agent! in English).

Dix pour cent is a French Netflix show, set at a fictional Paris-based acting agency, with a core cast (pictured above) playing the agents at the firm and a ‘real-life’ actor every episode playing a ‘version’ of themselves. For example, over the 4 seasons of the programme (24 episodes in total) we see Juliette Binoche, Jean Reno, Sigourney Weaver, Isabelle Huppert, and so on, each playing themselves in their own episode where the plot of that particular instalment essentially revolves around them and their interactions with the agency. It’s a great concept which gives the real-life actor a chance to parody and mock themselves in hilarious ways, but which also has many story arcs about the agency itself, and the personal lives of the agents (who, unlike the guest actor, feature in every episode).

I’ve seen all four series now, and in fact have started again from the beginning, watching with my parents. We are two episodes in and they seem to be really enjoying it. The student who recommended the show to me said that she is in a cycle herself of watching and rewatching it all on a loop: she will miss the characters so begin from the start, get through all the episodes and then, a few months later, do the same again!

Watching the programme helped my classes with my student because each day when we began I would explain which episode I had seen the previous day and we would start by discussing that as a warm up. Often I would ask about particular aspects of French language or culture that had come up, and I think this was a very good way to encourage her to be articulate and dynamic in her use of English, as she was actually talking about something she knew very well and was interested in, rather than the often rather dry prompts from the stock exam materials.

One particular bit of language which appeared in the show and which I discussed with my student is the French term bobo. Actually my student had already told me this word when it came up in an alternative context to do with particular areas of Paris and the type of people you find there. However, it then featured in an episode of Dix pour cent that I watched, so I had the meaning reinforced.

In this scene, shown above, two of the agents are trying to film in a public place for rather complicated and convoluted reasons relating to a contract that they have broken. As you can see, there is a guy in the background on an electronic scooter ruining the shot!

He is described by the agent Andréa as a bobo, which is a portmanteau of ‘bourgeois-bohemian’. What makes this interesting to me is that in the English subtitles the term is translated as ‘hipster’, however after discussing this with many of my French students it seems they disagree with that translation and the term is more nuanced — something more like ‘champagne socialist’ in English, rather than merely a ‘hipster’ (which many of them said they use in French). I think the translation to ‘hipster’ works fine in the context of the scene, but it was interesting to learn from my students that there was some additional subtlety to this term bobo and that they use ‘hipster’ themselves in their native language, with perhaps a very slightly different meaning from in English.

I spoke to a French former colleague about the show, and she described Andréa (seen with the cigarette above) as the main character and it being ‘based on a true story’. From this I extrapolated that the writer of the ‘true story’ had been the Andréa character and that the events in the show were adapted from her own life, but the sources I found online suggest that actually Dix pour cent is based on the memoirs of Dominique Besnehard, a French actor and talent manager. Either way, I think I agree with my friend that Andréa is the main character in the show, as several of the later story arcs revolve around her personal life and even from the early episodes she is one of the most watchable and formidable presences at the agency. Indeed, watching now for my second time and my parents’ first time, they comment constantly about her behaviour, usually paired with something about what an impressively-sized nose the actress who plays her (Camille Cottin) has.

Dix pour cent is a show that is compelling and funny even if you do not really have an interest in the French language — certainly it is easy to follow with the English subtitles, which are very high-quality. However, for people who do have an interest in the French language it has an additional layer of enjoyment for these bobo-like terms that pop up. I am looking forward to continuing it with the folks!

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SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS 

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’  Michael Pursglove, East-West Review

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.