Netflix’s Marseille promised to be a treat – a French political drama series with big stars and big production values.
Could this be, I wondered, an experience to parallel the superb police/legal drama series Spiral? Settled into couch with drink in hand, I press the button: Big opening, Gerard Depardieu enters a vast stadium, thousands of fans yell in excitement I’m in Marseille.
The actors deliver their opening lines. What comes out?
American English. Dubbed. Voices that don’t fit bodies. Sentences that don’t go with lips. Ventilated corpses. The essence of Frenchness eliminated.
What was Netflix thinking? That its audiences might get tired lips from reading subtitles?
I am thankful that my late friend Raymond Saucisson did not live to see this day.
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Stuart Campbell author 
Not unlike Russel Crowe in Gladiator. How he won an academy award is beyond me. He must be the only Roman general who ever spoke ocker. From his first line onward I said,’What are the producers/directors doing?’ I was of course proved wrong after he won the Oscar.
I also watched Helen Mirren play a Jewish woman in Woman in Gold (superb movie). She was brilliant and mastered the accent and the mannerisms. She is undoubtedly a great actor, and Russell is Russell. How he ever won an academy, and more so for Gladiator, defies believability.
Perhaps Russell would’ve been a hit in Marseille :-).
Ha! That one passed me by, Stu!