Streaming. "Black Sun": Isabelle Adjani leads a summer saga on Netflix full of twists and turns

Do you like soap operas, but don't have the courage to delve into the hundreds of episodes of Demain tout commence or Un si grand soleil ?

Feeling nostalgic for summer sagas but no longer have time to binge-watch 12 90-minute episodes? Good news, Netflix has you covered with Black Sun , a six-episode miniseries arriving on the platform this Wednesday .

It follows Alba (Ava Baya), a young mother on the run who finds an unexpected opportunity to bounce back by becoming a picker at a prestigious flower estate in Provence. But when the patriarch at the helm of the operation (Thibault de Montalembert) mysteriously dies, she becomes the prime suspect.

As the accusations against her mount, she makes an unimaginable discovery: the boss bequeathed his estate to her. She then learns that she is intimately linked to this wealthy dynasty and that she will have to face the wrath of the rest of the family (Guillaume Gouix, Louise Coldefy, Claire Romain and Pierre Gommé), headed by the widow of the deceased ( Isabelle Adjani ), more vengeful than ever.

Despite this rather classic basis for a soap opera - the unknown woman confronting an environment that is both opulent and hostile - Soleil noir is in fact a pastiche of this format. The creators of the series (Marie Jardillier, Edouard Salier and Nils-Antoine Sambuc) have chosen to extract the substantial marrow of the genre - its improbable twists - and to multiply them in each episode, which lasts around fifty minutes on average.

As a result, the series never drags its feet, and while the plot twists are sometimes overblown, there's an almost immediate thrill in seeing the characters go from hero to villain (or vice versa) in just three sequences, sometimes even several times per episode. Especially since the series is punctuated by fades to black that simulate TV commercial breaks. Obviously, the famous twists happen at these moments.

To make this kind of series a success, you need actors who can accept the excesses of the script, while maintaining enough truthfulness to make the situation believable. This is a good thing, as the cast is generally quite good.

But the one who really stands out is Isabelle Adjani. In a similar vein to her role in Romain Gavras's The World Is Yours , the star proves to be brilliantly detestable, taking an almost childlike pleasure in inhabiting this nest of vipers.

A love letter to summer soap operas and sagas, Soleil noir embraces its status as a guilty pleasure, which makes the series all the more enjoyable.

Black Sun , a 6-episode series, available from this Wednesday, July 9 on Netflix.