«Ten percent», season 4: the story of a coming out

Unpublished article - Jonas Follonier

The fourth season of Ten percent confirms the excellence of the series created by Fanny Herrero. Based on the world of actors' agencies, this French production, now available on numerous platforms, manages to combine good-natured entertainment with thought-provoking seventh art. To the point of multiplying symbols and double meanings.

André, Mathias, Gabriel, not forgetting Arlette, Camille, Noémie, Hervé, Sofia and Hicham: many viewers in French-speaking Switzerland will have seen them on their screens. RTS Un is the first to broadcast the new season of Ten percent, Each episode is presented on the Swiss channel a week before it airs on France 2. Showing the world of art agencies from the inside, the series follows the highly effective procedure of a French film star playing himself in an episode in a self-deprecating manner.

If the comedy genre has a privileged place in this well-crafted formula, it emerges even stronger in the contrast it creates with the other omnipresent genre in Ten percent, namely drama. The harshness of the film world is relatively well known, but had anyone ever thought of its application to artists' agents, the impresarios shall we say, to please the excellent character of Arlette Azémar (Liliane Rovère)? No, at least not for the majority of us mortals, uneducated and unaware of so many things. Art, let's not mince words, makes visible through the magic of representation facets of the world unexplored by our individual lanterns.

And it's precisely insofar as it's a question of representation, It's the fact that this TV series, which could have been an uninteresting TV movie, conceals its greatest strength. In fact, the well-known actors and actresses who parade through the corridors of the ASK agency are not there just to play themselves. They are there to say, through mirror effects and endless mise en abyme, that their agents themselves are actors. Since Ten percent is fiction, the agents are played by actors in the literal sense. And in real life, agents are actors in the dirty sense.

The highly successful fourth season is no exception to this philosophical and sociological depth of field. Without revealing too much about the little plots that make up the charm of this collective portrait, it would be impossible to conceal the screenwriters' greatest stroke of genius: the vocation that the touching Hervé André-Jezak (Nicolas Maury) discovers for himself as an actor. From management artist to comedy, from diplomacy squared to the truth of incarnation, from play to play, from one «I» to another, this story of coming out not as a homosexual, but as a professional, gives the story within the story an initiatory twist.

The latest season of Ten percent, with the participation of Charlotte Gainsbourg (astonishing), Franck Dubosc (sincere), José Garcia (sympathetic), Sandrine Kiberlain (hilarious), Sigourney Weaver (prodigious) and Jean Reno (overwhelming), has many surprises in store. There's no better company for the discerning lover of good French series or the good-natured guy looking to escape than with a glass of this grand cru in hand. In fact, it would seem that audiences and critics are rightly in agreement on this one... it's worth noting!

Write to the author: jonas.follonier@leregardlibre.com

Photo credits: © Christophe BRACHET - FTV/ MONVOISIN PROD/ MOTHER PROD