The Traveller (Le Voyageur)
Watching this French series was a very strange experience for me. Mostly it was not the content of the series that bemused me, so let me explain.
The first oddness was when the star of the series, Eric Contana, showed up on screen not wearing shorts. I had seen Cantona on screen many times before, but that was back in the early 1990s when he was one of the best football (soccer) players in the world, leading France and Manchester United to many titles. His football career fizzled out after he went into the stands and drop-kicked a fan – an even stranger story which ended up with the ‘fan’ serving jail time – but apparently after retiring from footy he decided to become an actor.
All that figured out, I settle in to enjoy the series. Contana plays a brilliant detective who got fed up with being told by his superiors to drop cases he thought he could solve, hence managed to get himself into a position where he would drop in to help local police forces with difficult to solve crimes. And Contana’s character really did drop out, selling everything including his house and driving to his assignments in a van he lived in while hunting, fishing, and doing odd jobs to survive. (I never managed to figure out if he was still getting paid as a policeman, but I don’t think so.) Hence the title of the series – he was living as a Traveller (or what we used to call a gypsy or Romany).
The first season of four 90-minute episodes was enjoyable as Contana’s character, well, travelled to gorgeous locations in the French countryside and interacted with interesting locals while solving interesting crimes. Imagine my surprise when the second season started and it was quickly mentioned, kind of offhand, that Contana’s character had been killed. Instead we get a new central figure, and this is where it really gets weird. He acquires Contana’s character’s van and even his dog and basically taken over as a mobile Traveller/cop. Unfortunately, without Contana the series didn’t really work very well. I managed to watch one more episode after that but, revealingly, no one has bothered making English subs for the remaining few episodes.
Then I did some research. Apparently Contana, who has Romany ancestry, was actually living the Traveller lifestyle during the filming of the first season, and then quit the show before the second season because it was interfering with that lifestyle. He still does the occasional movie, but I hope he’s happier with his life these days.
I would say the first season is definitely worth checking out, and maybe the first episode of the second season for the weirdness, but that’s it.
imdb.com |
