The greatest mystery in any French mystery drama is how the characters look so much better than any English person has ever looked. How did the cast of The Returned (more than 10 years ago now, though it feels like yesterday) look so gorgeous all the time, despite seemingly ordinary costumes, hair and makeup? Is Gallic bone structure really that different? Do clothes just hang better on the other side of la Manche? Is that why they call it “the sleeve”? Is it a clue?
Forgive me. I am consumed by this puzzle. The success of a French drama can be measured by how successfully the official narrative mystery distracts me from the conundrum, and here the new six-part series Promethea does just fine.
We begin with married couple the Lassets – Caroline (Marie-Josée Croze), a headteacher, and Charles (Thomas Jouannet), a doctor – hitting something that dashes out of the woods as they are driving home on a dark, rainy night. It turns out to be a teenage girl (played by Fantine Harduin) with neither a stitch of clothing nor a scratch on her. She remembers nothing about where she comes from or who she is, except for her name, Prométhée. They take her to hospital where she is examined by doctors and questioned by the police and, later by Charles’s colleague, psychoanalyst Marie (Odile Vuillemin). No concerned parents have reported her missing and the only clue to her identity is a tattoo on her wrist of a jellyfish.
The police, led by the permanently vaping officer Elise (Camille Lou), have been investigating the brutal murder two months previously of a teenage girl called Lea, but have come up with nothing. This changes when Prométhée starts drawing sketches that seem to match photos taken of the crime scene and having flashbacks to bloody horrors that suggest much but obviously won’t resolve into solid information until we have had a few more episodes of fun with them.
The Lassets’ daughter was killed in a motorcycle accident two years before, and the sense of pervasive grief is heartbreakingly shown, not least in their inadvertent emotional neglect of their sweet son, Hugo (Aymeric Fougeron). They are all immured by misery and Hugo doesn’t resent his parents for their behaviour, but takes what comfort he can in his girlfriend, Vanessa (Margot Heckmann). When Prométhée moves in with the Lassets to avoid going into foster care, the emotional stakes increase in intensity and complexity.
Clues and connections begin to take shape as everyone hares off on their own private investigations. Charles would like to know why there is blood on the car windscreen, but no visible injury to the girl herself. And it’s hard not to agree that this is a fundamental question that needs to be answered. He sends a blood sample to the lab for testing. Prométhée tracks down the house that she keeps drawing from memory flashbacks and the jellyfish tattoo artist who may know who she is.
Vanessa is Elise’s sister, which entwines the two families and plot lines from the start. Then Prométhée starts scrabbling in Lea’s garden and unearths a box of photos that one may assume the teenage girl did not intend her parents to see, but which at last provide a lead for Elise and her team. It is almost enough( along with Marie’s icy, watchful presence and her volunteered information that she has brittle bone disease – the equivalent of ostentatiously placing a gun on a Chekovian mantlepiece) without the suggestion of the supernatural that hardens into near-certainty as Prométhée begins to reveal unexpected physical powers. By this time, we are along for the stylishly creepy ride, so let’s enjoy it.
There is nothing wonderfully new or innovative here, but it is a nicely packaged and paced six hours of solid entertainment. It is a flavoursome binge rather than something to be lingered over and savoured, but who doesn’t have an appetite for that? And the sorrows of the two sets of parents add enough heft to keep it from being a simple potboiler, though with everything apart from their grief, tidy resolution is promised, every loose end tied up. Apart, of course, from that mystery of how they look so ordinary and so good all the time.
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Promethea launches on Channel 4 on Sunday and is available from streaming now.
