Two things jumped out at me back when I started watching the first season of Lupin, Netflix’s wildly successful show about a ‘gentleman thief’ in Paris who spends his days plotting heists and piecing together a scheme for righteous revenge. One, the show had some far-fetched moments, starting with the idea of a ‘gentleman thief.’ Two, the show changed up the usual action-crime-caper formula by making an immigrant the central protagonist and mastermind. It’s common for these suspense fantasias to have heroes who choose to use their powers for the good of the state, or alternatively to opt out of the forces of order and run rings around the law as an anti-hero. For Lupin’s central figure Assane Diop, played by Omar Sy, the choices were never really offered. Assane, an immigrant whose father died in prison and who had to build himself up from almost nothing, regards things like laws, privilege, social order, and patriotism as things existing to suppress him and people like him. Unlike James Bond, Jack Reacher, Bruce Wayne, and other larger-than-life adventurers, Assane never really had a moment in his past when he was part of the establishment.
But season 3 of Lupin also points out that Assane doesn’t really have an identity as an immigrant, either. “I’m everybody” he says in the last episode, showing off his room full of disguises, “But right now I’m no one.” Assane’s motivations are always personal, not cultural, and he isn’t exactly representative of a global group of people who find themselves lacking roots and casually exploited. If Assane is somewhat ambivalent about his identity, it helps to draw attention to the action of the show, the brilliant heists, the narrow escapes, and the set pieces that are improbable but so damn entertaining that you can forgive the heightened reality. After all, people seem to accept Batman’s gadgets and Bond’s apparent invulnerability to VD.
The first two seasons of Lupin told of Assane’s attempt to get revenge against Hubert Pellegrini (Herve Pierre), the magnate who framed his father. At the close of season two, having attained his revenge in spectacular fashion, Assane hinted that he’d be leaving Paris for a while–and my heart sank. The show makes extravagant use of one of the world’s most beautiful cities, and I couldn’t imagine Assane’s frequent thefts of jewels and objets d’art among lesser backdrops.
Fortunately, season 3 opens in Paris, and stays there for almost all of the series. As with previous seasons, the city’s well-known landmarks appear with pleasant regularity (the Eiffel Tower appears in episode one, and we also get Sacre Coeur, Pere Lachaise Cemetery, the Palais Garnier, and a climax at the Arc de Triomphe). If Assane is hatching a plan to steal from a bank or antiques collector, you can bet they’ll be located in one of the tonier arrondissements of Paris, in a restored building dating from the days of Napoleon III. If there’s a square foot of poured concrete architecture in France, you’ll never see it in this series.
Thanks to his very public exposure of Pellegrini at the end of season 2, Assane is now a well-known figure, with his face plastered everywhere–especially on posters put up by the police. Nevertheless, he comes to his accomplice Benny (Antoine Gouy) in the opening episode with a scheme to steal a priceless pearl, all while the entire nation watches. It’s a plan very reminiscent of Assane’s idol Arsene Lupin, the fictional gentleman thief of Maurice Leblanc’s pre-WWI stories; a crime whose upcoming perpetration is announced to the authorities, and which will come off without a hitch thanks to a series of variables set up in advance (Episodes of Lupin typically end with a breathless montage of the theft’s setup and execution, accompanied by a swelling orchestral score). This crime ends differently, however–chased across the rooftops of Paris as he makes his getaway, Assane attempts to leap across an alleyway, only to come up short, and he falls several stories, crashing onto the cobblestones below. A man finding his body declares him dead.
Viewers of earlier episodes will remember that Assane has faked his death before. Episode two begins with Assane’s corpse (?) being rushed to the morgue, by two doctors–one of whom is Benny. Claire (Ludivine Sagnier), his former lover and the mother of his son Raoul (Etan Simon), is called to the hospital to identify the body.
Assane is not the only Arsene Lupin obsessive in the series–the other is police detective Youssef Guedira (Soufiane Guerrab), who suspects that Assane took a page from the stories and faked his death. He meets up with a reporter covering the case, Fleur Belanger (Martha Canga Antonio), and they agree to share intel–because Guidera suspects Assane is simply hatching a new scheme.
The addition of Antonio to the show’s cast is significant. Reviewing the first season of Lupin, a critic on NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour pointed out something I had missed: The complete absence of Black women in the first season, something that continued into the second. This was especially significant when the show was focusing on Assane’s immigrant origins. Immigrant stories center around families, and families frequently have mothers, aunts, sisters, and cousins, very often in central roles. But not in Assane’s history.
Fleur is one of three Black female characters appearing in the season’s episodes. Another is Mariama (Naky Sy Savan), Assane’s mother. I had previously assumed that Assane’s mother had died before he and his father emigrated to France, but here we learn, and it feels like a retcon, that Mariama was in prison when Assane was a fatherless youth in Paris. Now she has come to join Assane in his adopted city, but she has run afoul of one of Assane’s old enemies–Benny assumes it could be any of the very rich and powerful people they’ve robbed in the past–and now she’s being held captive, used as a hostage to get Assane to steal for some faceless crook.
For Guidera is right, Assane is not dead, and his plan to escape Paris and start anew somewhere else comes to an abrupt halt. Now the faceless kidnapper of his mother wants Assane to steal a Manet painting, one which was stolen from Boston decades earlier and has been circulating in the underworld ever since, ending up with a homicidal gang leader named Cisco (Vincent Overath).
Stealing the painting from a killer is just the first act. In the next episode, Assane and Benny are ordered to purloin a priceless jeweled bracelet from a billionaire couple at a gala event held at a countryside chateau. This particular heist doesn’t quite go as planned–Assane himself sabotages it, leading to the most surprising ending in any episode of the season.
Here we get to another interesting aspect of Assane’s distancing himself from any real identity and becoming everyone and no one. Can the people in his life really trust him? Claire and Etan are still under the impression that he’s dead, though they, like Guidera, soon begin unraveling the truth, using Leblanc’s literature to do it. Certainly their lives haven’t been made easier by their association with Assane–Raoul was kidnapped in season one as part of Pellegrini’s plot to stop his light-fingered tormentor. A woman Assane romanced in season two discovered that she was another pawn in a heist. When dealing with someone who puts superhuman effort into planning massive deceptions, would a sane person entrust them with… anything?
Flashbacks to Assane’s past in 1998 reveal that he had his own crisis of trust, when he and his similarly parentless pal Bruno (Noe Wodecki) found themselves in a gym-slash-criminal hideout run by a Fagin-like boss named Keller (Salif Cisse). Keller is the kind of guy who offers boxing tips and gritty guidance to the young men in his establishment, but he also doesn’t seem to mind any stealing they feel the need to do, and he’s fine with pitting Bruno and Assane against each other. Assane’s then-girlfriend Claire (Ludmilla Makowski)–not yet the mother of his child–is wary of Keller from the moment she learns of him, but Assane and Bruno feel loyal to the man (young Assane is played by Mamadou Haidara).
I’d like to get in a word about Omar Sy’s disguises, which as in earlier seasons are all over the place. The biggest suspension of disbelief required for anyone viewing Lupin, or at least for me, is that Sy could be mistaken for anyone else. A towering, broad-shouldered man with piercing eyes and prominent features, I just can’t imagine him blending into a crowd–and in this season, all of France knows who Assane is and what he looks like. There are some getups that do a pretty good job, such as when he plays a groundskeeper in episode four and browbeats actual groundskeepers into helping him set up his heist, berating them with a comical accent (I suspect this is the kind of thing Sy was doing daily, back when he was a comedian on the radio). But in the same episode, he disguises himself as a coat checker at the gala, donning a wig and glasses, and somehow those minimal efforts fool everyone. There are also too many scenes where people comment to Assane that he looks just like the thief everyone’s looking for, and he replies with “I get that all the time!” Are all Parisians so clueless? NOT ONE of them can connect this action-film-star-looking guy with the crook the police are scouring France for?
Then there’s an elaborate latex mask that Assane wears when, to get closer to Claire and Raoul, he disguises himself as his son’s new basketball coach. It would be a fairly convincing mask in a photograph, but it doesn’t quite move like a normal face, giving it an uncanny valley aspect, a bit like Assane is auditioning for a Halloween remake. Maybe it’s me.
In episode five, Assane enlists the help of Guidera in unmasking the still-unseen kidnapper of his mother, by having the detective pose as the buyer of the painting Assane stole two episodes prior. Guidera wouldn’t trust Assane as far as he could throw him, but he plays his part to the hilt and in the process captures one of the kidnapper’s lieutenants–while allowing Assane to get away. Assane finds out who he’s up against, and begins to put together his final scheme.
The season’s last two episodes bring everything to a close–Assane’s efforts to save his mother, his revenge against her abductor, his reconciliation with Claire and Raoul, Guidera’s pursuit of Assane, and most significantly Assane revealing his care and responsibility for the people who trust him. It’s a satisfying close, with a little twist at the very end that promises a fourth season, one likely to be set, once again, in Paris.
Each season of Lupin improves on the previous season’s presentation, and season three has dazzling camera work, a terrific soundtrack, and fast-paced but never confusing editing. The action is especially good this time around–there are some great car chases–and Assane’s well-oiled schemes are as ingenious as ever. It’s a spectacular show, with hard-to-believe moments, but then it’s not claiming to be firmly grounded in reality. It invites viewers to savor the moment when a ridiculously clever thief’s ruse comes off without a hitch.
