If you’re a fan of some of the slightly wacky crime dramas, like ‘Professor T' or ‘The Marlow Murder Club', you might well have come across this quirky French series when season 1 aired last year on Walter Presents. Well, it’s back for a second season with more delightfully silly crimes featuring Judge Marianne Vauban and Captain Pastor.
If you want to avoid all spoilers, stop reading this article now.
It’s fair to say that this show could not be any more French if it was wearing a beret and singing the La Marseillaise. Marianne drives around in a battered old pale blue Citroën 2CV – a true French icon – and the opening episode in S2 is about subterfuge, fraud and murder in the world of pétanque boules. For the uninitiated, this is the uniquely French game of throwing a metal ball on a rough piece of ground in an attempt to get it as close as possible to the jack (or cochonnet in French).
A man has been found murdered on a piece of land he recently acquired for development. He was a hotelier and was looking to expand his hotel empire by building a new property. The murder weapon turns out to be – yes, you guessed it – a boule. Someone hurled the metal ball at him from some metres away, striking him a lethal blow to the head.
In addition to being a hotelier, the victim was also a keen boules player. And it’s soon clear to Marianne and Pastor that the likely perpetrator is going to be from the boule community, including the professional he recently beat in a competition, the ironworker who fraudulently added weight to the boules to make them more stable, and the man whose son committed suicide because of a scandal involving the sport. Who knew such a seemingly innocuous sport could be so cut-throat?
In a typically Vera-type fashion, our odd couple accuse and clear various suspects, until eventually Marianne hatches a plot to expose the killer. Although when the final dénouement does happen, the perpetrator is not who she thought it was.
There are some lovely vignettes away from the world of boules, too. For example, Judge Marianne is also presiding over the case of an amusement park employee who, whilst dressed as a lion, allegedly hugged and pulled down the trousers of a male visitor to the park. He is being charged with sexual assault, until further digging from our heroine reveals that all is not as it seems.
This really is a delightful little series. Walter and co have given us some very dark drama of late, but this is charmingly frivolous and great fun. Maybe the real world is dark enough at the moment, so perhaps some typically French charm is the perfect antidote to the reality. Definitely something to check out for some light relief.
Walter Presents: ‘Judge Marianne' Season 2 is available as a full boxset on C4 Streaming now.
