After the second season ended with Lupin on the run, Part 3 of the Netflix crime drama picks up several months down the line, with its eponymous swindler – real name Assane Diop, played by Omar Sy – desperate to find a way to make things up to his estranged wife Claire (Ludivine Sagnier) and their teenage son Raoul (Etan Simon). Season 3 isn’t quite successful in that department, thanks to some dramatic oddities regarding Assane and Claire’s dynamic, which it chooses to ignore. On top of that, its 7 episodes rely far more on flashbacks than before, albeit in ways that don’t always end up dramatically satisfying. It’s a step back from Part 2, which was both propulsive in its plotting and made sure its drama was tightly wound, but the show remains just as snappy and fun as its original run of episodes, never failing to lose sight of the fact that the gentleman thief, as a concept, is all about panache and sleight of hand.
The season’s hour-long premiere episode is practically pitch-perfect, with Assane being drawn back to Paris from his Marseille hideaway by the sheer glut of tabloid stories about Claire. He hopes to whisk her away from the ruthless media spotlight, but when he pays her a covert visit, she isn’t exactly thrilled. After all, it was his double life and criminal ambition that placed her and Raoul in this predicament to begin with.
Still, he hopes to make good on his promise, regardless of how Claire feels about it. It’s the kind of motive that leaves a bitter taste, and it’s only exacerbated by some of Assane’s actions throughout the season. And while the show does eventually bring things full circle, affording him the right kind of growth on paper, it keeps pushing off this vital character development. As far as his family life is concerned, Assane is kind of a creep.
That said, while this long-term objective is awkwardly executed, the show continues to keep one foot firmly planted in clockwork heist territory (the kind it all but perfected in season 2), as Mathieu Lamboley’s jazzy, energetic score imbues each sequence with thrilling momentum. To attain his long-term goal, Assane must first jump a number of short-term hurdles that – surprise! – involve various complicated capers, which he pulls off with only minor hitches, before flashbacks to weeks, days, and even minutes earlier show us the full picture of how he pulled them off (we also get answers to a specific kind of illusion that BBC’s Sherlock left frustratingly ambiguous). It’s the TV equivalent of intimate street magic. We’re right there, up close and personal as the plot unfolds. But like Assane’s many marks, there’s something we’ve missed – some diversion we haven’t seen.
Unfortunately, the unseen ends up far more intriguing than what the show opts to place in the foreground. Part 3 involves a litany of people from Assane’s past. These include characters we’ve seen before, like his reliable accomplice Benjamin Ferel (Antoine Gouy) and his policeman frenemy Youssef Guédira (Soufiane Guerrab) – the Inspector Ganimard to his Arsène Lupin, à la Maurice LeBlanc’s original stories – as well as a handful of newcomers who both help and hinder his schemes. While some of these newcomers work just fine as temporary pawns on a chessboard (albeit ones you wish Assane cared a little more about), this season also introduces a new kingpin lurking in the shadows, who seems hellbent on making life difficult for the master burglar. Why? Well, it takes about six-and-a-half of the show’s seven episodes before we’re even offered a clue, and in the buildup to this, each episode hops and skips around in time to relay information from years prior as and when it becomes relevant to the present plot. A lifelong quirk of Assane’s comes into play in a later episode, but the first we ever see of it is in a flashback minutes before it becomes relevant.
The show’s gratuitous back-and-forth, while at times half-baked, is never quite boring. This is mostly because young actors playing Assane and Claire in 1998 – Mamadou Haidara and Ludmilla Makowski – come into their own this season, as young adults trying to find their place in the world. However, it’s at least a little bit strange that the season-long backdrop to these flashbacks – France’s successful 1998 soccer World Cup campaign, which made megastars out of players like Thierry Henry (born to parents from the Caribbean) and Ghanaian-born Marcel Desailly, kicking off major changes to how the country saw itself through the sport – is never tied into Assane’s ongoing story.After all, the show thus far has been at least nominally about modern French identity, since it centers on the son of Senegalese immigrants, who in previous seasons takes advantage of disdain wealthy white society has for him, allowing him to slip by unnoticed. In fact, this season, he deploys several white characters’ apologetic default setting against them, making them think twice about whether they might see him with suspicion because he’s Black – rather than, you know, because he’s robbing them right beneath their noses. It’s a marvelously funny juggling act, even though Part 3 never really takes advantage of its proletariat-versus-bourgeois backdrop in more than a passing sense. This too is a key element of the premiere episode, playing into the public’s perception of Assane, but it doesn’t really come up again.
Still, for all its flaws, Lupin Part 3 remains largely enjoyable from start to finish, thanks in large part to its not-so-secret weapon: Sy’s debonair performance. He’s an actor whose smile can melt your heart, but he can switch quickly into a primal protective mode, brimming with fury, as soon as his family is threatened. Most of all, with his litany of colorful disguises and his unmistakable swagger, he exudes an effortless cool, as if the show’s framing and music were all warping and contorting around him as he saunters through each hallway and private office. You can’t take your eyes off him – which is really the best diversion of all.
