The small office dedicated to investigating unidentified flying objects in France decided to install a telephone during the split of the 1970s. And that pissed her off. Because he started accepting calls from the Martians. And it’s little that Clémence Dargent and Martin Douaire, unsung creators of deliciously absurd UFOs (Filmin) – something like the berlánguica investment of The X-Files, or what might have been active in the past if business had fallen in the hands of Mulder and Scully from the eerily surrealist Quentin Dupiex, I want to make that very clear. This part of what is said in UFOs is true, including the evidence that life sometimes feels like an infinity of dead ends, embodied here in hundreds of thousands of charming and harmless cases that can never be closed.
More information
For Didier Mathure (an adequate and enduring Melvil Poupaud), forced aerospace engineer, life does not smile on him. The rocket on which he had been working for years with his wife Élise (a haughty and intelligent Géraldine Phailas), also a very prestigious astrophysicist, has just exploded in full flight, and it seems difficult for the CNES – the French space agency – to trust him. Him again. Moreover, Elise left him. Not because of the rocket, but because of all sorts of other things. Having to look after their children, a hardworking and reluctant teenager and a slyly dismissive toddler, without having the last idea how to go about it, only adds chaos to a situation that has just escalated when, for a twist of fate, their upper extremities. at the head of GEPAN, the aforesaid office of the ridiculous X-Files.
Transformed into a cantankerous and necessary Fox Mulder, his interest is basically determined to postpone his exit as soon as possible: his director has promised him a majestic new European thesis if he manages to put it in language, including the last vacancies for solve the cases—accompanied by his sidekick Dana Scully (Rémy, a charismatic Quentin Dolmaire), Mathure’s first task will be to stop a small-town spaceship TV from talking about the flying saucer that is supposed to have passed the previous darkness and with it — or something like that. — with a door-to-door piano dealer with keys in the color of the cadenza. Yes, the too beautiful stupidity (the scenes on the scale of the city which follow Didier and Rémy could be subtitled Welcome, Mr. Martian) is served. And in an almost vignette sense for once.
Melvil Poupaud and Géraldine Pailhas hold the reins of “UFOs”.
There are few pleasantly recognizable things, a comic speech with clear outlines -the classic European comic strip- which correctly and curiously absorbs the story, with a precise and varied plot, because the background case, that of the missing carny, is crossed by others. Some, like the one on the melohinomaniac sect, were related to it, others, like the one on Jean Michel Jarre’s gigantic disco hoax which could pass through who knows what in exogenous space, no, but the one and the other flesh out the story in all directions, really in a direction where once you start to see the possibilities of this other world, you’re faithfully in another world. Incidentally, the story is filled with a bunch of fun science facts, like why flamingos are pink: they eat the shrimp they eat.
“We are the third space power, they know me at NASA and they are separating!”, the director of CNES said to the protagonist at one point. It happens in advance, as it would in one of Víctor Nubla’s Pendergast-language stories – like the one in which a couple and their two children stop to buy a balloon from a street vendor on a street in Toronto, only to come out a moment later. , vendors included, at Krakow Cathedral: The naivety begins to spin out of control, just as Mathure’s own life has spun out of control. And maybe the least important thing, and this is one of the morals of the story, is whether or not it has an explanation, because out of naivety we just want things to go back to their business, or at least we can accept it.
Douglas Adams, giant of nonsense and extraterrestrial, author of The Space Hitchhiker’s Beacon but in addition to the fascinating Dirk Gently, brought to the small screen by Max Landis with a greedy success, would certainly have been proud of Dargent and Douaire, disciples of Doctor Who , the classic which is still a work in progress, in addition to the nonsense and the extraterrestrial because it managed to land in France, always elusive, a small humorous explosion of the heroic void, the ridiculous, the determined. breeze suit, finally more than laugh yourself. The series presents another possible world for fiction – “I like to think the world isn’t so fed up,” says Vera (Daphne Patakia), the operator who at one point channels little of the nonsense of the story- of which, in addition, filming The Paranoia We Inhabit
You can follow EL PAÍS TELEVSIÓN on Twitter or subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
Receive the TV newsletter
All the news of the channels and platforms, with interviews, part and prospecting, as well as the recommendations and criticisms of our journalists
REGISTRATION
50 percent small
Exclusive content for subscribers.
navigate without limit