It is possible to discover on television and free streaming this dramatic series adapting a great classic of French literature.
The classics of French literature are inexhaustible sources of series adaptations. A new French production to watch for free, in streaming or on television, is a new example. Made up of only 4 episodes of one hour each, it transposes a novel released in 1947 to the screen: Plague by Albert Camus. Remember that the original novel tells how a plague epidemic spreads in the city of Oran, in the 1940s, and dissects the reaction of the city’s inhabitants. But the disease is in reality an allegory of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. When writing this book, Camus denounced Nazism and the Occupation in particular.
The particularity of this mini-series inspired by Plague is that the plot of the novel this time takes place in our time, in the early 2030s, when the world has already experienced the coronavirus pandemic. In an interview with Linternaute, Gilles Taurand, screenwriter of the series, justifies this decision by “the rise of extremism and authoritarianism”, which means that “Plague is extremely topical.”
For Gilles Taurand, “Plague today, it’s the totalitarian Plague”. He cites “the democracies threatened throughout the world, the fear of foreigners, the fact of naming a culprit, during Covid, the anti-Asian racism which has flared up. ..” “All this makes it a perfectly contemporary book”, according to the author. Through the series, the screenwriters also sought to “develop the parable, the allegory, the dystopia” in our time. And this, with the approval of the writer’s daughter, Catherine Camus, who “thought that it in no way betrayed the spirit of the book”.
Gilles Taurand believes that it would have been “unthinkable and impossible” to film Plague in Oran in the 1940s “for practical reasons”. “But beyond that, the world we are talking about is a bit Orwellian, with remote surveillance and a central government regime which is not far from what we can see today, for example in China, in Shanghai, when 25 million Chinese were imprisoned [confinés en avril 2022 à cause du Covid, NDLR]. There are resonances which mean that this adaptation was not arbitrary, on the contrary.”
Plague is available on the free streaming platform France.tv from Monday March 4, 2024. The 4 episodes are also broadcast on France 2 at 9:10 p.m., two per week, on March 4 and 11, 2024. In the casting, spectators will recognize Frédéric Pierrot (In therapy), Hugo Becker (I promise you), Sofia Essaïdi (The fighters) or even Judith Chemla (A life).