Put on your meta-fictional cape, hat and mask, we're going to play Zorro, we're going to play with the legend of Zorro. With all due respect to Douglas Fairbanks, Tyrone Power and Antonio Banderas, one Zorro surpasses them all in our collective memory: The one played by Guy Williams, for Walt Disney Productions, from 1957 to 1961. He was the one who galloped through the night, ridiculing the paunchy Sergeant Garcia and punishing the cruel Commander Monastorio, all with the help of his mute manservant, Bernardo.
Within this black-and-white microcosm (both literally and figuratively, for in the legend's colonial California, the good guy is perfect and the bad guys are despicable), Benjamin Charbit and Noé Debré have tried out a number of experimentations. They have aged the masked avenger by two decades, married him off, entrusted him with political responsibilities and burdened him with financial worries. Naturally, there will be dueling swordplay and late-night horseback stunts, but most of the – considerable – energy lavished on this project is not devoted to the legend of the liberator, but rather to the story of his mid-life crisis.
By choosing to focus on the age of doubts and regrets, this version of Zorro inevitably loses some of its vigor. The series' languid pace and the main characters' melancholic acting sometimes brutally clash with the comic situations they are in, producing an incongruous creation that is at times disconcerting, but often charming.
The series is set in Los Angeles in 1821. Don Diego de la Vega (Jean Dujardin) is about to succeed his father (André Dussollier) as mayor of the fledgling city. The light-hearted romantic has become a kindly estate owner, brimming with well-intentioned ideas that he struggles to put into practice. His wife, Doña Gabriela (Audrey Dana), looks on Don Diego with a mix of compassion and exasperation.
No sooner has this man of few qualities been depicted than Los Angeles falls under the financial thumb of Don Emmanuel (Eric Elmosnino), who has no qualms about exploiting the mass native population. Somewhat reluctantly, Don Diego pulls the black costume out of the mothballs in which Bernardo (Salvatore Ficarra) had kept it. While this resurrection allows for several heroic scenes, it also enables this version of Zorro to set up a unique geometric configuration: A love triangle with just two points. Realizing that Zorro has his wife all hot and bothered, Don Diego's masked double seduces his own wife.
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