A breath of fresh air is blowing on French fiction and in particular on Amazon Prime Video. After the very successful Miskina, the poorposted on September 30, here is Darknet-sur-merwritten and directed by Rémy Four and Julien War, available on the Jeff Bezos platform.
In Ponet-sur-mer, a small fictional coastal town in Charente-Maritime, Flo (Théo Fernandez) and Ben (Léon Plazol), two young geek friends set up a little scam in the form of a joke. On the Darknet – an anonymized version of the web that hosts a lot of illegal activity – they create a fake Albanian mafia page where you can hire the services of a killer for a pawn. The trouble begins when a real member of said mafia (Artus), unable to take action, calls on their services and discovers that he has been cheated.
The dual geek/mafia duo
Between comedy and thriller, Darknet-sur-mer relies on a double duo, that of the geeks and that of the mafiosos. In the role of the geeks, we find Théo Fernandez, who notably held the title role in Gaston Lagaffe, and Leon Plazol. The chemistry between the actors was revealed during the casting, as Theo Fernandez explains to us: “When, at a casting, they try to see if a duo matches, I hate that. I hate when it’s forced, that we have to act like we’re super accomplices. (…) And yet, very naturally Léon made me laugh. We quickly saw that we could agree on the humor and it was not at all forced. It was so unforced that there were times when we laughed to the point of forgetting the people in the room: the directors, the casting director, the camerawoman… They were the ones who told us “well, we’re going make the scene”. And then I thought, “OK, whether it’s us or not, there’s something”. »
A feeling shared by Léon Plazol: “There was a kind of evidence, particularly linked to the fact that we always followed each other in our respective careers, we went through the same castings, we both started quite young and suddenly there was a kind of thing, it was normal that we find ourselves working together at some point. »
Asterix and Obelix
Mixed thing for the mafia duo, Aklan and Veran, embodied by Artus and Imer Kutlovci. “It matched very quickly, there was no ego war as there can sometimes be, so we quickly became very close and it was super pleasant. “, reports Artus. Beyond this aspect, they took pleasure in composing this mafia tandem composed, in appearance at least, of a soft and a hard. “It’s a bit like Asterix and Obelix,” jokes Imer Kutlovci. Both enjoyed their character’s ambivalence. Artus, who played a DGSE agent in The office of legends, goes this time to the other side: “Playing a villain is always cool. But there it is a villain who plays the villain but who is not really, ”he explains.
Imer Kutlovci, he is delighted that for once he is offered a mobster, but with another dimension: “There are two sides to Veran. With the others, he is very tough, very firm with Alkan and with his fears, he is very gentle and very human. This is what creates a comedy in itself. »
The young lady of Ponet-sur-Mer
In this fiction filmed in Rochefort (Charente-Maritime), she is the only real young lady and Joséphine Draï does not sulk her pleasure. The actress-comedian, seen in particular in Heart map, says she loved the action side of her role as a village police officer. “It was very exciting for me to know that I was going to have stunts, fighting, handling weapons. Everyone can imagine that it’s nice to do when you’ve never done it. In this brigade of broken arms, led by the ex-Inconnu Pascal Légitimus, she is the only one to take her job seriously. When her brother Ben finds himself in the grips of the Albanian mafia, she’ll finally get a chance to work on a real deal and do a little more than check out locations at the Oyster Party.
In the end, it’s Joséphine Draï [pour l’anecdote, elle est la fille du batteur de Bashung, et la Joséphine de Osez Joséphine] which best sums up the spirit of Darknet-sur-mer : “It’s a comedy, quite cynical, always on the edge, it’s not big schoolboy gags. In the writing, it’s quite precise, there’s a real rhythm and that sort of thing is a bit off in France. There’s a lot of humor based on uncomfortable situations, on people who are a little embarrassed to be where they are. And that, she adds: “it’s rather Anglo-Saxon”.