C&C 29: The Oddest Show I Watched in 2023

What if Amazon made a TV series with an Academy Award winner and didn’t tell anybody?

We didn’t set out to watch Alphonse (2023). We didn’t even know it existed. Rosemarie and I were simply scrolling through streaming interfaces searching for something to leave on, the video game that all of us play and nobody ever really wins.

Our eyes were glazing over. Just as we were considering drastic possibilities—should we talk to each other?—we simultaneously pointed at an Amazon Prime thumbnail and said, “Is that Jean Dujardin?”

The Oscar-winning actor is not only the star of Alphonse, he co-created the six-part series. The description served up by Amazon reads like ChatGPT was asked to play coy, rambling about how the title character “reconnects with a father he barely knew and discovers a surprising new calling. Along the way, he meets a galaxy of women, each more exciting and quirkier than the last, plunging him into a journey that is both perilous and transgressive, yet filled with kindness.”

Perilous, transgressive, and filled with kindness? Why, that’s the best kind of journey there is! All boxes ticked, we gave it a whirl, wondering why Amazon wasn’t actively promoting this new show.

Some rudimentary research answered that question. Nicolas Bedos, the César Award-winning filmmaker who created Alphonse with Dujardin, writing and directing every episode, faces trial next month for alleged sexual assault. That investigation led to multiple additional complaints.

In July, Amazon was “understood to be holding internal discussions about the fate of” Alphonse. Their decision was to release it in late October with zero promotion. Compounding the negative publicity is the fact that Alphonse’s subject matter is sex. Specifically, an aspect rarely considered in mainstream entertainment. Which is why I’m going to pay more attention to the show than Amazon is.

Dujardin’s Alphonse is a sad sack trapped in a loveless marriage and barely clinging to his job. When his estranged father (Pierre Arditi) suffers a heart attack, Alphonse discovers the old man’s secret—he has worked for decades as an escort, catering to the sexual and emotional needs of a devoted clientele who have aged along with him. Now père needs fils to take over the family business.

The show deals with the sex lives of older people—Alphonse’s new customers range in age from their fifties to their eighties—exploring how desire and the need to be desired do not always fade with the years, and how the hold of memory and fantasy intensifies. There are plenty of sex scenes, featuring the kinds of bodies that the camera usually ignores.

All of which makes me wish I liked Alphonse, as opposed to finding it interesting, frustrating, and ultimately infuriating. But I did make it through all six episodes.

Bedos gives the show a cinematic scope. At times the flashbacks are playful, but too often they result in jarring shifts in tone and rely on the broadest strokes to color the lives of Alphonse’s clients. His wife is undergoing a crisis of her own, coming to grips with her attraction to other women, but the subplot feels like a titillating sidebar until late, made bearable only by the presence of Charlotte Gainsbourg in the role. An idiotic crime story lurches through the series, but at least that allows for the introduction of Vincent Macaigne, so memorable as the addled director in HBO’s Irma Vep, playing a low-rent private eye savvier than he lets on. The show’s cast is its prized asset; that “galaxy of women” features luminaries like Nicole Garcia and the fantastic Francine Bergé, who have their moments to shine. And it offers a positive, nuanced portrayal of sex work.

Holding the enterprise together is Dujardin. He is a superlative clown, a gifted actor, and an objectively handsome man, a rare trifecta. People still gripe about the Academy Awards success of The Artist (2011)—in Hollywood: The Oral History by Jeanne Basinger and Sam Wasson, Michael Ovitz proclaims, “Who gives a shit about The Artist? It’s a beautiful little film, it’s not Best Picture!”—but I won’t hear a word against it or Dujardin’s performance. While we were watching Alphonse, we had a rare chance to revisit on the big screen the reason why he is revered in Chez K. OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies (2006) is no mere spy spoof. The film, which first teamed Dujardin with The Artist’s director Michel Hazanavicius and co-star Bérénice Bejo, is a painstaking recreation of 1950s espionage fare—a hotel room brawl features period fighting so accurate that it reduces me to helpless laughter every time—that also lampoons the sexism and xenophobia of the era. The 2009 sequel, OSS 117: Lost in Rio, is nowhere near as funny. Bedos directed a third entry, OSS 117: From Africa with Love (2021), that got embroiled in culture wars and was never released in the United States. Dujardin kept me tuning in to Alphonse, his title turn supremely silly and deeply human, often at once, his character blossoming as the constant roleplaying in service of others finally allows him to be himself.

But then, oh, then, came the last episode. Une catastrophe nonpareil.

Alphonse teases a queasy storyline that no American series would touch, but hey, this show’s French. The finale addresses it directly in a manner that’s unsatisfying. Then, with twenty minutes to go, the story vaults ahead six months. The characters—all of them—are in a new setting that doesn’t make logical sense. While you’re still trying to make head or tail out of what’s happening, comes the denouement, a nihilistic shrug that obliterates whatever good will the show has engendered. Self-sabotage at that level almost demands admiration. My immediate reaction: I want my six hours back.

Rosemarie, more invested in the show than I was, suggested after a few moments of silence that perhaps the ending was intended metaphorically and the story would be resolved in a second season. But if there’s another outing of Alphonse, I will mange my chapeau.

What (Else) I’m Watching

The Three Musketeers—Part I: D’Artagnan (2023). Let’s stay in France. That this movie, a runaway hit in its homeland, isn’t getting a US theatrical release—it’s available on demand—is a cinematic crime. It’s great, gritty, and brimming with that all-too-rare Gallic export, panache. Plus, that cast! Vincent Cassel, Romain Duris, Louis Garrel as King Louis XII, Eva Green as the duplicitous Milady de Winter, and an ethereal Vicky Krieps as Queen Anne, delivering a different gloss on royalty than she did in the underseen Corsage (2022). This film and Godzilla Minus One (2023), another of the year’s best, prove that effective blockbusters are still possible. You just have to look somewhere other than Hollywood.

Ferrari (2023). I attended an exclusive private screening of this film, meaning I was the only person at the matinee. The circumstances only amped up the intensity of Michael Mann’s thorny biopic. Penélope Cruz channels pure Anna Magnani realness.

American Fiction (2023). An author repeatedly told that his work isn’t Black enough decides to give the industry what it wants, only for the prank to backfire. The publishing barbs in the movie, funny and on point, resonated particularly with me because I’m wrapping up one stint as a judge in a literary competition and about to start another. But Cord Jefferson’s debut feature is about so much more: family, caregiving, figuring out who you are and what aspects of yourself to reveal. Brilliantly written, perfectly cast from Jeffrey Wright down to the smallest roles. A real favorite.

Where I’ll Be

Kate Alice Marshall is a longtime friend. We worked in the video game salt mines together. She is also a wildly talented and prolific novelist. Her latest thriller, No One Can Know, is a doozy, out from Flatiron Books on January 23. The night before that—Monday, January 22 at 7PM—Kate and I will be in conversation at Seattle’s renowned Elliott Bay Book Company. Come out and join us.

What I’m Reading

“Consider that if you shrink your personality down to just one thing, people may have a much easier time connecting with you.” Jeremy D. Larson writes in the New York Times Magazine about the power of committing to the bit. As someone whose identity is nothing but a grab bag of digestible tics—Cocktails! The Mets!—I can attest to the effectiveness of this approach.

Speaking of cocktails—that’s kinda my thing, you know—Robert Simonson chronicles the evolution of the airport martini. A friend of mine has Simonson beat; he ordered an airport Manhattan and received one with a cherry tomato instead of a cherry.

Queens, the borough of my birth, the home of the Mets—also kinda my thing—and, for decades, haven to jazz musicians.