The Disappearance, shown in France a year ago, was adapted from a Spanish drama. Both shows had a more gender-specific title: Desaparecida or Disparue. A less abstract translation into English might have been The Missing, but that title had already been taken by a recent BBC drama with which The Disappearance shared a dogged fidelity to a template (see also Broadchurch, plus a lot of Nordic noir): one fresh suspect per episode, enough false leads to set up a red herring factory, and then a big reveal to finish [spoiler alert: the denouement is discussed below].
The titular absentee was Léa Morel (Camille Razat), who went out one night in Lyons to celebrate turning 17 and never came home. It took four episodes for a corpse to turn up, another four to find out who killed her. There were plenty of potential culprits for new cop in town, the reflective detective Molina (François-Xavier Demaison). Half the city’s youth seemed to be in love with Léa. But in the end the drama came down to a rupture in the dense network of family loyalties. From episode five, when the camera started looking at Léa’s uncle Jean (Laurent Bateau) in a funny way, it seemed evident he was being fingered. At the end of the penultimate episode he chillingly gaffed by revealing to his brother Julien (Pierre-François Martin-Laval) something about the murder that he could only have known if he was in some way complicit.
Jean duly confessed to murdering Léa, on top of the blackmailing prostitute Jenny and former employee Nico whom he fitted up as the killer, and found himself banged up with half of the final episode still to run. Underwhelmed, you wondered why everything had been wrapped up so precipitately. When visiting Jean in prison, his daughter Chris (Zoé Marchal) seemed implicitly to forgive him the murder of her cousin a little too easily. Sure enough the story crept out, of a fatal fight between two cousins, the motherless only child Chris desperate to emulate the life of Léa, even down to wearing the same earrings while sleeping with her rival’s boyfriend. Her father's false confession, plus his pair of ancillary murders, bought her a future in the family of the cousin she'd killed. The truth revealed itself to Léa’s mother Florence (Alix Poisson, pictured below with Pierre-François Martin-Laval) as Chris, a cuckoo freshly landed in the nest, occupied Léa’s bedroom, invaded her wardrobe and claimed her identity.
For all the quiet bond between the Morel brothers, The Disappearance was finally a gripping crime drama that hinged on the female psyche. The showrunner was Charlotte Brandström and the two main scriptwriters Marie Deshaires and Catherine Touzet. They ensured there was plenty to keep you coming back for more: a high level of pulchritude in the cast, panoramic drone-cam settings, and a kinetic narrative style which cut to the chase whenever a new lead came up. There was none of that endless leaping in and out of cars integral to The Bridge. Demaison was hugely watchable as a humane cop you could really root for, while Poisson as the bereaved mother was the drama’s beating heart, matched by Stella Trotonda’s amazingly confident performance as the eight-year-old Zoé (especially as the rest of the young cast looked about five years older than claimed).
There was also plenty to query. Obsessive in his desire to find his daughter and then her killer, Julien Morel had an infuriating habit of interfering with police business, turning up at crime scenes as if by divining rod and in the end even filching his daughter’s inquest notes from Molina’s desk. Molina’s teenage daughter Rose (Myra Tyliann) was a fun distraction but the parallels between the two fathers looking for Léa’s killer were insufficiently explored, while it felt gratuitously tidy to have her find Léa’s body on a day out at the lake. It wasn’t quite clear how or why Jean would own the perfect bag with which to zip up a body, plus a shovel for burying it. A Twin Peaks fan ready for all eventualities? And maybe this is just a French thing but, even though they'd already been steeled by grief, Jean and Chris were both possessed of implausible levels of sang-froid as they kept their dark secret from the audience and the other Morels. The fondness for portentous slo-mo was a bad habit picked up from Broadchurch. And how come a mere waiter could afford a house with his own private garage?
The script had an insouciant attitude to the business of tying up loose ends. Julien didn’t pass on to Florence the discovery that Léa was a cocaine dealer. Florence’s abortion drove a wedge between her and Julien, but the discovery of Léa’s pregnancy by her racing instructor was never deployed as a plot lever. It was left to the viewer to assume that perhaps raging hormones contributed to her bitter outburst which provoked her murder.
The Disappearance's outro felt psychologically pat. With Chris interred after a fatal car accident when she dashed from her new home, and the Morels’ trauma laid to rest with her, the conclusion looked towards a happier future. We were also invited to imagine the melancholy Molina hooking up with his comely comedy sidekick Camille (Alice Pol, pictured above with François-Xavier Demaison), whom the script never quite worked out what to do with beyond giving her a fetching array of low-cut tops, a snack habit and a useless ex-boyfriend. A second series has been mooted. How about making it a screwball policier romcom?