What if the dead came back – but were unaware they had passed away in the first place? This is the intriguing premise of The Returned, aka Les Revenants, a deeply philosophical and endlessly absorbing French twist on the “classic” zombie parable.
Here, the newly risen are – forgive the pun – dead ringers for their old selves, with zero inkling how or why they came to be living again (and, for the most part, unable to recall the circumstances in which they shuffled off this mortal coil to begin with). Presenting a fresh-take on a mouldering formula, the series has become a sensation and anticipation is high as it returns for a second season. It is, in essence, a brain chomper with a soul.
“If you come back, can you pretend you are still alive? That was the idea behind the first series,” says Yara Pilartz, who plays “returned” teenager Camille. In the opening episode of season one Camille is killed in a bus crash. Four years later, she manifests on a road-side and walks home, none the wiser to the fact she is dead and that, though traumatised by her absence, her family has nonetheless moved on.
“As a ‘returned’, you are still your old self,” explains Pilartz. “But you feel different – you start to look at the world in a different way. In season two, my character begins to accept this new identity.”
Going into the first season, Pilartz was moderately dubious as to whether she’d done the right thing in signing up for a mere TV series. She does not own a television and seems distinctly iffy towards the medium, which is generally looked down upon in France as insufficiently intellectual.
“I don't watch TV. I’ve never seen a series,” shrugs Pilartz. “I have prejudices about what a TV show even is. To me, it is something that is commercial, a little bit silly. But it soon became clear Les Revenants was different. It poses a very simple yet profound question: what is it to be human?”
The series is aesthetically distinct, with the French Alps backdrop made to look endlessly eerie and a chugging Mogwai soundtrack raising the tension. The Scottish instrumental band were approached by director Fabrice Gobert and wrote the score based on a detailed treatment of the first season and the scripts of the first two episodes. As shooting got underway, Mogwai’s music started to arrive – Gobert listened to it intently, utilising the mournful compositions to frame the look and feel of his work.
“When we first got the synopsis in the very early stages, they asked us for some music in return, so we sent them a bunch of demos,” the band’s Stuart Braithwaite told interviewers around the release of the first run of episodes in 2013. “It was all pieces that we’d already written beforehand and recorded in our houses, so they weren’t tailored towards the film at all, but they came back and told us that they liked most of it.
“We were on tour when they were going to start filming, so we went into the studio and recorded quite a lot of what became the final soundtrack before seeing any footage. What was interesting, though, was that they were playing the original demos we sent them whilst they were filming. Drawing up ideas, developing the production – they already had an ‘active soundtrack’, if you will.”
“We didn’t know them beforehand so we went through their record label,” is how Gobert recalled the initial meeting of minds. “I sent them a presentation about the project and they were interested. I spoke to them via Skype - in halting English - and I insisted on the idea that I wanted them to have a free approach to the work. I spoke to them about my references in terms of musical soundtracks: Louis Malle’s 1958 film Elevator to the Gallows and Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 movie Dead Man. In these two films, Miles Davis and Neil Young made music unlike the music you’d usually hear in a thriller or a western. Their scores were so strong that they became like real characters in the plot. I wanted to do the same thing with The Returned.”
In, France there was much hand-wringing over how The Returned would be received. As already stated, television does not have a stellar reputation in the country and it was important that the series was highly regarded internationally, particularly in Britain and the United States (the standard bearer for quality TV so far as the French are concerned). In order to win an audience it was felt that The Returned needed to achieve two things simultaneously: give viewers something they had never seen previously yet, in the same heartbeat, draw on familiar tropes.