Haven of Grace is a noirish French series on MHz Choice about a family patriarch taking stock of the mess he’s made of his life. Pierre LePrieur (Olivier Gourmet) is a respected union elder at the huge Le Havre port in Northern France. The plot kicks off with his sons being arrested for trafficking, since drugs were found in one son’s car that the other son happened to be driving. But the drug trafficking thing is just a Macguffin. The real story is that the men in the LePrieur family have made, and keep making, spectacularly bad decisions that are ruining their lives. The series is beautifully shot with the port as a visually interesting backdrop. It has a feeling of doom, and you may think you know where it’s going, but I guarantee you there are surprises that you will not see coming. Several, in fact.
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The Characters
Pierre is about to retire from a storied career on the docks. He is an old-timer who tried to uphold a code of honor in which dockworkers do not participate in drug trafficking. But times are changing and the temptation of money is too great, so the traffickers have dug into the port. Pierre, not one to give up, is trying to put together a case against the offenders, which triggers the harassment arrest of his sons Jean (Pierre Lottin) and Simon (Panayotis Pascot). Jean imports and sells American cars, and he is bitter that he never got the attention from Pierre that he wanted. Jean leant a Shelby Mustang to his ne’er-do-well younger brother Simon, who gets pulled over during a joy ride. The cops find a kilo of coke in the floor of the car. Simon is surprised. So is Jean, who denies he put it there. Nevertheless, they are both arrested for drug trafficking. Their sister Emma (Margot Bancilhon), who happens to be in town for Pierre’s birthday, is a lawyer in Paris. Despite the family’s sniping about her “Parisian morality”, she stays to defend her brothers. Both sons are up to shady things, but they aren’t drug traffickers. However, starting with the arrest, their lives go completely off the rails.
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Our Take on Haven of Grace
Each episode of Haven of Grace ends with such gasp-inducing cliffhangers that you will find yourself watching the first 10 minutes of the next episode no matter how tired you are. The writers dole out the information for maximum shock value, and they do it well. I can’t say much about the bad decisions people make without spoiling plot points, but I can say that Jean has a horrible temper which leads to impulses such as bringing a screwdriver to a gun fight, and Simon is ambitious, foolish and bratty. There is an underlying theme about classism that provides some back story to the family drama. What does not work for me is the mournful voiceover from Pierre that winds through the series about how his family is cursed. He sets himself up as such a bad guy who ruined his family, and maybe that’s true, but unfortunately, it doesn’t jive with the casting of Olivier Gourmet, who is a likable teddy bear. However, the plot goes in such surprising directions that I binged the series. If you like twisty family drama, Haven of Grace is for you.
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