Image courtesy Netflix
LUPIN on Netflix stars Omar Sy (The Intouchables) as Assane Diop, the son of a Senegalese immigrant to France whose father Babakar Diop is wrongfully accused and pressured to confess to the theft of a priceless necklace known as The Queen’s Necklace. Set in Paris, the filming locations of LUPIN take the viewer from the most upscale of the upscale to the banlieues where someone like Assane might have grown up.
The backstory in LUPIN is told through flashbacks (with a most excellent casting of younger versions of characters, from a physical perspective). In present-day, Assane learns that the necklace has been found and is being auctioned off at the Louvre. Assane is a sort of modern-day James Bond/Sherlock Holmes/Thomas Crown all rolled up into one, having learned the tricks of the trade from “The Gentleman Burglar” Arséne Lupin, the titular character in the books by Maurice LeBlanc.
To achieve revenge on the Pellegrini family who framed his father, Assane assumes many identities (and costumes). The first season is five episodes and it has just been confirmed that a second season has been commissioned. That’s lucky for viewers because the first season ends on a cliffhanger. And despite all of the flashbacks, we still don’t fully have a sense of who Assane is really. But still, the caper is fun and the script attempts to get a bit beyond the blockbustery feel of the heist — addressing, though mostly superficially, issues of class and race in French society. The New York Times calls LUPIN a international hit that’s a “new twist on a classic French tale.”
If you’re curious about the filming locations for LUPIN, we’ve got you covered! Many of the filming locations are places we’ve covered in our Untapped Paris archives, so enjoy a little trip to Paris through this article!
1. The Louvre
Photo by Emmanuel Guimier/Netflix
So obviously, The Louvre is the most prominent filming location in LUPIN. Not only is the auction of the necklace, which once belonged to Marie Antoinette, taking place in this famous museum in the heat of Paris, but Assane has gone to work under cover as a janitor so he can prep for the heist.
Photo by Emmanuel Guimier/Netflix
The Queen’s Necklace is on display in the Louvre before the auction and we really get to see some of the magnificent galleries and spaces inside the museum, including the I.M. Pei-designed pyramid and the lobby space below it which is used for the auction, the famous paintings of Liberty Leading the People by Eugene Delacroix, the Mona Lisa, and more. There have been a history of art heists in Paris and the Mona Lisa itself was stolen in 1911.
Photo by Emmanuel Guimier/Netflix
