'Call My Agent! The Movie' review: A beloved French series returns for a satisfying film

It's been five years since "Call My Agent!," known in its home country as "Dix pour cent" ("10 percent"), ended with the staff of Paris' bankrupt ASK talent agency moving en masse toward the exit, as in the closing moments of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show."

The rich workplace comedy mounted four seasons from 2015 to 2020; the fourth was made without its creator, Fanny Herrero (she went on to create the fine but less successful "Standing Up," about Parisian comics). But she has returned, along with "Standing Up" writer Lison Daniel, for Netflix's "Call My Agent! The Movie," which picks up the scattered ensemble more or less where they imagined they'd be when the series ended, and gets them back in the same frame.

As a movie, it's its own sort of beast — a complete statement in a single package, with not just A and B stories, but C and D as well, and arcs that might develop over a season of the show compressed into a couple of hours. But its essentials are essentially unchanged: It's still about the difficulty of making art, and the often unsavory business that lets art get made, with known actors playing fun house versions of themselves and our heroes attempting to wrangle them into order, with whatever works — lies, bribes, real shared feelings. The regular cast, many of whom Americans will first have met here, still feel identical with their characters, rather than just professionals who have been paid to play them, so that even when the action is outlandish the emotions are real.

The focus here is on the fierce Andréa (Camille Cottin), who has left agenting and is about to direct her first movie, a drama set in the woods, and Noémie (Laure Calamy), whom Andréa hires as a replacement producer — she has become the producer of a hit workplace comedy, "Les Colleagues."

Noémie is still with Mathias (Thibault de Montalembert), once the most formidable of agents, who has quieted down somewhat owing to a Season 4 heart attack, and the fact that he's working in the agency his daughter Camille (Fanny Sidney) announced at the end of the series.

Andréa's movie brings the old cast together, including sensitive junior agent turned aspiring actor Hervé (Nicolas Maury). (Stéfi Celma's Sophia, a receptionist turned actor, is sadly missing.) Much goes wrong, before things go right. On the eve of production, Andréa loses her male lead (Laurent Lafitte as himself) to a Wes Anderson movie; the psychologically delicate actor they get to replace him, Vincent Macaigne as himself, has a messy history with the other lead, Laetitia Casta, also as herself.

Then there's a storm.

The French actors playing themselves are not well known here — Casta may be more familiar as a '90s supermodel, for those who are familiar with that sort of thing — but Americans have been given the gift of cameos from Eva Longoria and an uncredited George Clooney who takes a comically unproductive lunch meeting with Andréa, crashed, in more than one sense, by Noémie.

Though the series finale made for a satisfying ending, there was already talk then of another season or a film. Still, "The Movie" arrives seemingly out of left field, as sort of a happy surprise. It doesn't betray its legacy. We know from the supermarket magazines and internet scandal sites that some actors are seemingly as crazy as these actors pretend to be. But somehow movies get made. Most every show business satire is also a show business celebration. There's no business like it.