‘Monsieur Spade’ Review: An Inconsistent, Heavy-Handed Neo-Noir

The James Bond-esque opening sequence of Monsieur Spade sees a glimmering 1950s whip winding down a spectacular country road in the south of France. Inside the car is Sam Spade (Clive Owen) and a doe-eyed young girl, Teresa (Ella Feraud), whom the legendary detective, first introduced in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, is trying to reunite with her father. When plans go awry and the pair end up stranded, they’re rescued by a glamorous French woman named Gabrielle (Chiara Mastroianni). She, we learn, will become Spade’s wife.

Flash forward eight years and Spade is a broken-hearted widower overseeing Gabrielle’s estate near the town of Bozouls, and he’s placed the teenaged Teresa (now played by Cara Bossom) in a local convent. But what led Spade to a remote town in France with the young girl in the first place? And what occurred in the subsequent eight years to leave him embroiled in his late wife’s feud with a man named Philippe Saint-André (Jonathan Zaccaï)?

The opening episode feels labored and disjointed, with the necessary information spoon-fed to viewers through a series of clunky conversations between Spade and other characters. Once the groundwork has been laid, though, Monsieur Spade gathers pace: A mystery man cloaked in a monk’s habit has broken into the convent and, in his search for an Algerian boy (Ismaël Berqouch) he believes to be hiding there, murdered all the nuns.

Meanwhile, we learn of several parties who also seem to be interested in this boy’s whereabouts, from Philippe to George Fitzsimmons (Matthew Beard), a rambunctious young painter, and his mother, Cynthia (Rebecca Root), to senior figures within the Catholic Church. Although the boy’s specific worth remains unknown, it’s clear that it amounts to some kind of political leverage in the ongoing conflict between France and Algeria, possibly implicating forces like the OAS, a far-right terrorist organization that opposed Algerian independence.

Spade’s role in all this is like that of Agatha Christie’s Hercules Poirot, as he’s reluctantly thrust into solving the mystery despite his hopes for a peaceful retirement. Bearing all the emblems of the archetypal detective—the hat, the suit, the never-ending supply of cigarettes—Spade is supposed to be suave, mysterious, and sardonic. But some of his attempted witticisms lack their intended pith. When, for instance, one character asks Spade whether he knows where the word “sabotage” comes from, he smugly replies, “The dictionary.”

Interwoven with the show’s main storyline are numerous subplots. The troubled but loving relationship between Jean-Pierre (Stanley Weber), a war veteran tormented by PTSD, and his wife, Marguerite (Louise Bourgoin), is fine-spun and devastating, but other plotlines are scantly developed and difficult to invest in. Spade’s ill-health, for one, is heavily signposted at the start of the series but then inexplicably forgotten toward the climax.

While the main plot is initially intriguing—with conflicting efforts to obtain the boy revealing an entanglement of vested interests at play in the unassuming Bozouls—by the final episode, the story’s host of morally bankrupt, self-interested characters have blended into one. And big revelations—including secret relationships between seeming adversaries—are disconcertingly glossed over. While it may invoke tropes from the 007 films and Christie’s mysteries, Monsieur Spade’s heavy-handed setup and unsatisfying ending prevent it from rivalling those works.