Éric Rochant embraces Bandi’s life in Martinique (review)

The creator of the Bureau of Legends signs, with his daughter, an endearing family and criminal saga, with the West Indies as a backdrop.

The Lafleur family deserves to be known.

Éric Rochant returns to the camera five years after the end of The Bureau of Legends. In the meantime, he had directed two episodes of Everything is OK, a sensitive drama about cancer broadcast in 2023 on Disney+. This time, change of terrain: direction Netflix, for a new original creation. And not just any series: Bandi is quite simply the streaming giant’s first series filmed in Martinique.

Put online this week, Bandi stands out as a gangster saga anchored in the French Caribbean, following the destiny of the Lafleur family. At its head, Marilyn, a single mother of eleven children, who tries as best she can to keep them on the straight and narrow while juggling crushing insecurity. Between the big brothers and the little sisters, a close bond seems to keep the siblings afloat. Until the tragedy. Marilyn dies suddenly in a scooter accident, in the middle of the night, on the way to work. Everything changes. How to survive when you are already on the brink? To avoid being separated, the Lafleurs will make a radical choice: dive into drug trafficking.

“Drug money is not our life!” nevertheless repeated the matriarch. But reality catches up with them. And the gearing is easy. In the Trénelle district, on the heights of Fort-de-France, Bandi then unfolds a pure criminal mechanism. On paper, nothing very new: the strength of blood ties, loyalty, settling scores. Everything goes there. But the decor changes everything. The series implicitly digs into the precariousness that is eroding the Antilles, far from postcards. Filmed almost entirely in Martinique, it captures an island raw, in lush vegetation and crushed by this humid heat, where social tensions remain omnipresent.

Alongside his daughter Capucine, co-creator and screenwriter, Éric Rochant builds a dense family fresco, populated by endearing characters. Even if Bandi tends to aestheticize Thug Life, sometimes presenting it as an almost unavoidable way out, we can’t help but fall for this XXL siblings, where each of the 11 children manages to find their place – despite very uneven performances within the cast recruited entirely on site.

Much more conventional than The Legends Bureau, Bandi nonetheless remains an effective family thriller, which gains in intensity as the episodes progress. And which, at times, evokes the sticky humidity of a certain Ozark…

Bandi, season 1 in 8 episodes, to watch on Netflix since April 9, 2026