Having already dipped his toes in the world of televisual storytelling with 2018’s Ondes de choc miniseries (where each of the four founding partners of Bande à part Films directed one episode based on a Swiss true crime case), Jean-Stéphane Bron has now made his full-fledged series debut with the six-part thriller The Deal, unveiled in Locarno (two episodes in Piazza Grande’s open air theater, the rest in the Fuori Concorso section). Its international scope and somewhat ironic topicality should make it an enticing acquisition for networks all over the world.
One of Switzerland’s foremost documentary filmmakers, Bron has always had an interest in what happens behind the scenes in places of power (in 2013, he received preemptive backlash for shadowing right-wing politician Christoph Blocher, when the resulting documentary turned out to be far from hagiographic). So it’s no surprise that, for his first original idea for television (with his frequent collaborator Alice Winocour as co-creator), he turned to an event in the recent past that caught his (and the world’s) eye.
Specifically, he chose the talks that took place between 2013 and 2015 and eventually brought about the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action regarding Iran’s nuclear program. Bron – who was inspired to make the series after the United States withdrew from the agreement in 2018 – focuses on the 2015 negotiations that took place in Lausanne, Switzerland (although the show relocates the story to Geneva). Tensions are high, and not just because of the geopolitical ramifications of the titular deal: the Swiss diplomat Alexandra (Belgian actress Veerle Baetens) has to face a crisis of her own when her former beau Payam (Arash Marandi) enters the picture.
Each episode follows the dual unfolding of public and private storylines, with the opening credits consistently reminding us that while the premise is rooted in fact, the plot of the series is very much the fruit of the writers’ imagination. And while Bron has dabbled in fiction filmmaking in the past, The Deal displays a confidence that comes from the ideal balance of the real and the poetic license. Intimately familiar with the area depicted on screen, the director turns the Geneva location into a tense hall of secrets and lies, basically taking his usual approach and adding a serialized thriller filter on top.
While each installment retains its distinct narrative identity, the overarching plot makes it easy to binge-watch all six episodes at once (as is customary with Swiss productions, domestic viewers can choose between the weekly rollout on linear television – in this case the French-language network RTS – or the simultaneously available full season on the streaming platform Play Suisse). One might even say Bron, coming from the world of film, chose a story that could be told as though it were one long movie, however trite that expression may be.
In fact, the series is the quintessential hybrid of the director’s documentary practices and the world of fiction storytelling: whether it be the duration of filming in one case or of the overall project in another, he gets to spend all the time he needs with his subjects/characters, eliciting the emotional nuance that fuels the narrative propulsion alongside the suspense. The methodology may differ, but the result is largely the same, in more ways than one: what is technically a period piece (as are several documentaries by the time they actually reach our screens) has now become a chilling, timeless portrait of a world where nothing ever changes, cyclically (and cynically) returning to square one.
Director: Jean-Stéphane Bron
Screenwriters: Jean-Stéphane Bron, Alice Winocour, Eugène Riousse, Julien-Guilhem Lacombe, Stéphane Mitchell, Valentine Monteil
Cast: Veerle Baetens, Juliet Stevenson, Arash Marandi, Anthony Azizi, Fenella Woolgar
Producers: Philippe Martin, Lionel Baier, Sidonie Dumas
Cinematography: Adrien Bertolle
Production design: Véronique Sacrez, Liza Weinland
Costume design: Isabelle Pannetier
Music: Amine Bouhafa, Christian Garcia-Gaucher, Gast Waltzing
Sound: Julien Momenceau, Annabel Aquaviva
Production companies: Bande à part Films, Les Films Pelléas, Gaumont Television, Bidibul Productions, Versus Production, RTS Radio Télévision Suisse, ARTE France
World sales: Gaumont Television
Venue: Locarno Film Festival (Piazza Grande, Fuori Concorso)
In English, French, Persian
270 minutes
