![]() Kay, an English writer who worked on the BBC America series Killing Eve, brings to Lupin some of his previous show’s impudent spirit, as well as a willingness to tweak its audience’s expectations. “The locals were sitting on a fortune,” an elderly Parisienne tells Assane (who’s pretending to be a policeman) during one con as she entrusts her most precious diamonds, looted from the Belgian Congo, to his care. ![]() If the original Lupin was an ethical criminal, stealing only from those members of high society who deserved it, Assane’s thefts are even more pointed: Many of his schemes are acts that reckon with racism in France and the country’s legacy of plunder. Assane’s backstory-his father was a Senegalese immigrant who was framed for a crime he didn’t commit-is unique, but both characters are motivated by injustice. But the original story’s ethos of righting wrongs is baked deeply into the show too. Certainly, this is in part because Lupin is a thrilling caper show, with the theft of a historic necklace dating back to Marie Antoinette (as in Leblanc’s story), a mystery, and an irresistible hero-Sy’s Assane could charm les oiseaux out of les arbres, and his magnetism, in one scene, outshines the Mona Lisa. The five-part series is Netflix’s first French-language megahit. Read: 20 undersung crime shows to binge-watch The con relies on his conspicuousness in some circles as much as it does on his ability to be unseen. But in the same scene, when he shifts into his next character, an entrepreneur attending an auction, Assane saunters into the museum resplendent in a purple suit, smiling broadly and nodding hello to all the wealthy white patrons around him. At the Louvre, dressed in a formless jumpsuit and clutching a box of cleaning products, Assane blends in among the other janitors-people of color like himself-vacuuming carpets and taking out the trash. ![]() Rather than directly translate the character to television, the writer George Kay imagines Lupin as the inspiration for a 21st-century con artist named Assane (played by Omar Sy), whose history mirrors Lupin’s and whose balancing act as a moralistic thief is given extra depth by his race. ![]() Both crimes are audacious, seemingly impossible, and conducted with a strong amount of swagger: Lupin might be a master of disguise, but he’s also a peacock who learns to play on his notoriety as often as he makes himself invisible.Īs adaptations go, Lupin is close to perfect. The necklace the child managed to pinch also features in the first episode of Lupin, in which a janitor working at the Louvre stages a dazzling heist inspired by his fictional hero. In the 1906 story “The Queen’s Necklace,” one of Maurice Leblanc’s first outings for the character, his origins are explained: Lupin’s first robbery was staged when he was 6 years old, after witnessing his mother, an impoverished gentlewoman, being ill-treated by her monied employer. ![]() Before Arsène Lupin was the inspiration for an out-of-nowhere Netflix smash hit, projected to be watched by 70 million subscribers, the character was a French literary legend, a gentleman thief with the moral code of Robin Hood, the wits of Sherlock Holmes, and the anti-aristocratic instincts of Robespierre. ![]()
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