Someone should ban Sunday afternoons on Arte: a somewhat conventional but touching Parisian ode

In the cold of Paris, Isabel Coixet depicts young adults in search of meaning, who have the same poetic outlook on the world.

After Foodie Love, her series also broadcast on Arte, Spanish director Isabel Coixet leaves Barcelona to return to the French capital, 20 years after her segment in Paris, je t’aime. His new creation depicts a youth in distress, at the dawn of adulthood.

“Do you know Cassavetes?” Close-ups on the covers of Gallimard, fantasized youth of the 60s, the cinema Le Champo and soft music. Someone Should Ban Sunday Afternoons poetically captures the atmosphere of a city defined by its artistic impulse, but sometimes without much subtlety…

Louise Barbier, an overweight young woman from Limoges, arrives in Paris in the hope of making a film. On her way she meets Charlie, a drug addict – the outspoken and sexually liberated badass of the group – and Nelson, a young mixed-race man, in love with an older woman.

Despite its somewhat overly expected characters and situations, the mini-series succeeds in capturing the Parisian charm through the eyes of a youth lost between the constant need for performance imposed by society and the feeling of integrity. Louise writes well, but no one wants a script that tells a platonic love story. We let ourselves be carried away by the nostalgic melody of the shots or settings showing the capital in a sober light. Fiction does not, however, deny the truth of the city. Even if she doesn’t frankly portray her poverty, her dirt, we are far from Emily in Paris…

Louise’s gentle replies, sprinkled with humor, her ambiguity, also seduce the viewer. A charming main heroine that we would like to see blossom.

Someone should ban Sunday afternoons also saves millennials (people born between 1981 and 1996) from a box in which previous generations put them. Here, no one dreams of Instagram success or reality TV, but of literature and cinema. “A lot of things are said about my generation, they say that we are less intelligent, narcissistic, that we complain all the time…”, Louise says by way of introduction…

It is also through places that the filmmaker accurately understands this generation. Gone are the quays of the Seine, the Pont-Neuf and Saint-Germain-des-Prés. It is Belleville, the Canal de l’Ourcq and the Barbès aerial metro which are filmed.

As for the plot, if it is based, like many TV fictions before it, on romantic plots, it is only to better bring out the emotional world of its three heroes, who are called upon to succeed in their lives…

“Come on, let’s pretend love exists.” The dialogues sometimes follow conventional formulas which undermine the dramatic dimension instead of thickening it. The protagonist played by Clara Bretheau – who we found in Les Amandiers – serves a few lines that miss the point. Charlie, with infinite casualness, returns under the skirts of his mother, a rich gallery owner played by Jeanne Balibar, to beg her for money while delivering a somewhat grandiloquent tirade on society.

Nelson, played by Théo Christine (Live, die, rebirth), escapes clichés. Far from the archetype of virility or the toxic guy, Nelson aims to become a sushi master and has a weakness for older women… The fine lines in the corner of Jeanne Balibar’s eye outline her beauty.

Between the zany and romantic Paris of Iris (2024) by Doria Tillier and that of Icon of French cinema, the series oscillates between delicacy and lyricism, in a universe sometimes a little too impregnated with the artistic imagination of the City of Light.

The first episode of Someone Should Ban Sunday Afternoons is broadcast this Thursday evening on Arte. The complete series is already available for streaming on Arte.TV.