Cécile Ducrocq and Benjamin Adam reinvest the Garnier Palace for a suite devoted to the return to the life of the fallen star Zoé Monin. We have rarely filmed the dance and its performers with so much natural and simplicity.
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After a surprising first season of vitality and enthusiasm, carried by the beautiful presence of Ariane Labed (Interpretation Prize at the Séries Mania festival in 2021), the series created by Cécile Ducrocq and Benjamin Adam reinvests the sumptuous decorations From the Paris Opera for a suite devoted to the return to the life of the fallen Star Zoé Monin. Created under the OCS Originals label with a comfortable budget, the Opera is currently one of the most ambitious productions in the chain and, proof of the great hopes that it is placed in it, the shooting of the second season ( Between Paris and Belgium, European co -production obliges) very little followed the dissemination of the first.
If Zoé is better, he only has a handful of years to shine on stage and, to regain the confidence of the institution, she combines roles at the risk of exhausting. Now quadrille – the lowest grade, nicknamed “the waiting room” by the young dancers -, the former “supernumerary” Flora (Suzy Bemba), which Zoé had taken under his wing, understands that having managed to integrate the Company is not enough to guarantee him a place on stage. Especially since the house is in crisis. Without director of dance after the departure of Sébastien Cheneau (Raphaël Personnaz, who retains an important role in season 2), the Opera asks a former charismatic professor, Diane Taillandier, to officer as Ballet’s mistress while ensuring a sort of discreet temporary work – which will necessarily end up giving it ideas.
The media coverage of the post of dance director by Benjamin Millepied then by Aurélie Dupont, two stars of the environment who each paid the cost of the ambiguities of this half-artistic, half-mannerial position, has the advantage of anchoring The intrigue of the series in reality: the Paris Opera remains, in this season even more than in the previous one, a workplace like any other, with its divergent strategic visions, its quarrels of ego and its more conflicts or less open. And it is because it avoids any fascination with its subject that the series once again manages to seduce.
a world folded on itself
This season owes a lot to the arrival of Anne Alvaro, a veritable “stage thief”, in the casting. Wearing a haughty head and ferocious judgments, the actress easily accommodates the outrageousness of the character of Diane and gives this role an astonishing density, as if three centuries of French tradition of the ballet rested entirely on her shoulders. His confrontation with a troop of dancers both fascinated and paralyzed by his requirements introduces an additional tension and once again poses interesting questions on the values of excellence carried by the institution, and on their adequacy at the time .
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