A series that dusts off the genre! Successmusical in 10×20 minutes, available this Friday on France TV Slash, tells the dreams and disillusions of three inseparable girls, Hanane (Inès Ouchaaou), Maissa (Assa Sylla) and Ambre (Charlie Loiselier) who live in the same city, near Sète. How did this slightly crazy series project come about?
“Sened Dhab, the director of digital fiction at France Télévisions, wanted a musical. I had seen Catherine Regula’s musical show at La Villette, entitled place of mythos, which touched me a lot. It told the story of the city with great authenticity and sincerity, and at the same time joy and vital energy. So I contacted her,” says Reusss producer Elizabeth Arnac, who 20 minutes met at Séries Mania where the actresses of Success were crowned best actresses in French competition.
A series inspired by a play
“I work in the suburbs and run a theater company. I wrote this play with young people. What I find in the series is that these young people who live and live there have difficulties, but are sunny, have the energy and the will to get out of it”, continues Catherine Regula, the co-creator of Success with Jérôme Larcher.
Success, which means “sisters” in verlan, starts on the day of the results of the baccalaureate of Hanane, Maissa and Ambre. The series tells the summer that will follow, probably the last set before entering adulthood. A summer strewn with pitfalls, between screwed up boyfriends, intrusive parents and threatening drug dealers. Galleys that they will sing and dance over the episodes as in a film by Jacques Demy. “Each has a personal problem, Hanane, sup career and social determinism through high school, Maissa, being the breadwinner, Ambre, with her parents and their assumptions about what success is”, summarizes Elizabeth Arnac .
“We were a little overwhelmed by the references, confides the producer. Me, it was West Side Story because there is this extremely violent urban universe where there is a magnificent youth who risks getting lost by putting their energy where it should not. This is the great danger of the city, a violence to which it is sometimes pushed. And, of course, Jacques Demy since in France, he is the ultimate reference. »
A colorful suburb à la Demy
“We wanted a very lively city. We chose the suburbs of Sète where the weather is very nice, where the sea is there, a sparkling blue”, underlines the producer. If the series recalls the work of Jacques Demy, it is also because of its dazzling colors.
Reusss was filmed on the island of Thau, a heavenly name which designates an artificial territory, built in 1968 to meet the needs of a so-called modest population, which has become a so-called popular district.
“The suburb of Sète is located on a peninsula! It’s nonsense that tells the madness of these ghettos. There is only one road by which one enters and exits. The city, communist for a long time, wanted to open up, so there is a fairly exemplary number of buses, but it remains an excrescence outside the city… This tells of the political urban planning wills of the 1960s and 1970s, we set them aside, ”analyzes the producer.
Songs written in chorus
The music was entrusted to rapper Proof. “He has a strong hip-hop register, but we encouraged him to use a fairly wide palette ranging from hip-hop to R & B, through slam or variety. There was the idea of having several registers. For the opening scene, that of the results of the baccalaureate, we are in a register of fairly classic musical comedy for example, ”comments the producer.
The location of the sung parts was defined when the script was written. “These are the moments of exaltation of feelings,” says Elizabeth Arnac. And to explain the song creation process: “The writers had fun writing songs, but they knew it wouldn’t stay. The lyricists of Prooof have reappropriated them so that they stick with the rhythm of the melodies”. Beneath these inventive and joyful sung parts, a more serious theme that is not often addressed in French fiction: the difficult emancipation of girls in the suburbs. “Their social environment and their respective families are a handicap to their own flight”, concludes Catherine Regula.