The French have their own way of doing things. The aesthetics of his cinema and television are a reflection of a culture that has had a great influence on the thinking of the modern world. In many ways, today's world is in debt with France for the sensibility to look the political functioning of most Western countries. USA built, for better or for worse, the empire of the sitcom and the commercial cinema; while France has maintained its reign of art in its purest form. That is the essence of the A Very Secret Service, a nonsensical series of humor, which bares the bureaucratic megalomania of a country that has imperialist tradition has not been seen enough on this side of the Atlantic.
The way in which the creators present us this version of imperial France is the entry -without explanations- of the young André Merlaux to the French secret service. It is the decade of the 60s and the world is torn between the Cold War and the independence movements of the European colonies. In this scenario, André Merlaux will have to discover how the administration of the intelligence services of the "largest nation in the world" works. His adventure consists in fit-in an inexplicable labyrinth of offices in which it is tortured informants who do not know anything; phones that sound and nobody wants to answer; receptions in which representatives of foreign delegations wait for a turn that will never arrive, because nobody is willing to receive them. The most experienced agents are so suited to this functioning that every crazy action seems natural to them and their bureaucratic logic finds odd and odious the common sense.
A Very Secret Service is a series about a French government completely disconnected from reality and blinded by the functioning of an administrative organization that exploited and oppressed its African colonies to make them a picturesque caricature. Through the most stark black humor it show us the political and social instability of an administration that in its delirium of greatness not only it state that it has won the Second World War, but also considers itself the owner of the destiny of Africa and of the other countries under its influence.
As already hinted, all this government ideology is sustained and based on its employees, bureaucrats of all levels for whom paperwork, procedures, protocol are a religion that gives order and meaning to their life. Paradoxically, and as a clear need for the humorous essence of the series, the awkwardness and narrow-mindedness of these officials explains the perverse functioning of a repressive and retrograde state, which tortures political prisoners, ignores requests for independence and celebrates of lively parties daily in the office, all in the same time and the same building.
We can consider that this series is a criticism of the imperialist system of Charles de Gaulle's France, and we do not wrong. However, the most important is the French vision itself of a behavior and an ideology far removed from the romantic image of the country that gave the world the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Of course, seasoned with a sufficient dose of humor, to show their high political content and make us laugh without complexes.
