“Our era experiences, one would say, the anxieties of old age which turns back to its past. (…) In short, we are republishing modern fables: 'Arsène Lupin', 'Rouletabille', 'Chéri-Bibi' come out of their graves. (…) But 'Fantômas' outclasses them”
, wrote Jean Cocteau in
Le Figaro Littéraire
, in 1962. What would he think today?
Lupine is the delight of Netflix (and the misfortune of Étretat which is already awash in visitors) and, we have just learned,
Fantômas
will return to the screen.
To discover
TV program: Find tonight's TV program
A prolific work
Nicolas de Tavernost made it known in a tweet.
“Very happy to announce that the SDN and M6 teams will produce, with producer Wassim Beji, the film and serial adaptation of Fantômas, the iconic collection of French detective novels.
A great challenge ahead!”
, writes the chairman of the management board of the M6 group.
Wassim Beji co-produced in recent years
Black Box
,
An Ideal Man
or
Yves Saint-Laurent
by Jalil Lespert.
Literature's most brilliant and disturbing villain was created by a tandem of journalists, Souvestre and Allain, in 44 novels between 1911 and 1913, dictated for speed.
The success is immediate.
The filmmaker Louis Feuillade adapts the work into five films in the process, the literary world seizes this symbol, from Raymond Queneau to Apollinaire.
Marcel Allain continued writing novels until 1963.
Read also“We have the impression of having become the museum of Omar Sy”: Étretat attracts the many fans of
Lupin
At the same time, Louis de Funès and Jean Marais popularized the character even more, but gave him a completely different nature: he became much less cruel.
In 1979, Helmut Berger in turn endorsed the costume in a television series.
In a very different style, Jan Kounen, the director of
99 Francs
, will think about adapting the novels for a while.
It now remains to be seen which Fantômas will imagine M6, which seems to have a lot of ambitions for him.