Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Can You Hear Me?’ On Netflix, A Dramedy About Three Women Living In A Low-Income Section Of Montreal

Helping a viewer see a city they thought they were familiar with in a new way is one of the more powerful things a TV series can do. Montreal, for instance, is a city people think is either artistic, modern, or colonial-era elegant. But it has its gritty sections, and the same socioeconomic strata as any other city. Can You Hear Me?, in its second season in Canada, debuts on Netflix this week; it’s a look at three friends who live in a poor section of Montreal who band together to help them deal with their individual messy lives.

CAN YOU HEAR ME?: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: The Flying Lizzards’ version of “Money (That’s What I Want)” plays, as a young woman in front of a burrito place dances. We see another woman waiting in her car, and a third woman sitting in an office.

The Gist: Fabiola (Mélissa Bédard), Carolanne (Ève Landry) and Ada (Florence Longpré) are three old friends who live in a low-income section of Montreal. When the first episode opens, Fabiola is outside the burrito place where she works, bopping to a song in her headphones. Carola is in her cousin’s car, sick to her stomach as texts from a man named Keven (Victor Andres Turgeon-Trelles) keep popping up on her phone. She’s so distraught that she opens the car door and pukes onto the pavement.

Ada is in what looks like a dreary government agency building, talking to a therapist. This isn’t voluntary, as we see examples of Ada’s anger issues coming out in various smacks, knees to the groin, and primal screams. She’s at court-ordered therapy after she smacked someone with a hamburger — “I thought the bun would soften the blow,” she tells the therapist. But Ada isn’t taking it seriously, obsessing over how the therapist pronounces her name rather than actually listen to anything she has to say.

Carola, who’s been waiting for her outside the building, still won’t talk about what’s been bothering her; she mainly mutters what few words she does say. On their way to see Fab at the burrito place, they stop in an alley so Ada can fuck a guy who owes her 20 bucks, then go to the burrito place. There, Fabiola is dealing with her co-worker and sometime boyfriend, Jean-Michel (Fayolle Jean Jr.), who seems to take advantage of her more than actually regard her with any respect.

As they hang out in Fabiola’s apartment, her grandmother fast asleep, Ada tries to pry loose what’s been bugging Carola, with no success, and she also tries to tell Fabiola can do so much better than Jean-Michel. “Stop thinking I don’t realize I’m being used,” Fabiola tells Ada. The three decide to sing in the Metro to make a few bucks, with Fabiola and her fantastic voice leading the trio. They take their cash, smoke on some train tracks, then get huge bags of popcorn and rent some DVDs (well they get them for free after Ada flashes the clerk). When the three of them hang out in Carola’s cousin’s car, Carola gets a text that finally lets loose all the emotions she’s been tamping down.

Our Take: Already in its second season in Canada, Can You Hear Me? (original name: M’entends-tu?) is a show that could be pigeonholed in the “girls behaving badly” category of series we’ve seen in the last few years, usually involving people living in low-income environments who have run out of fucks to give about what people think about them (Florida Girls comes immediately to mind). Underlying Can You Hear Me?, though, is a look at Montreal that we don’t often see on television, and that part is pretty fascinating.

Ada, Fabiola and Carolanne put up their emotional walls in different ways: Ada has anger, Carolanne shuts down, and Fabiola basically lets herself be treated like garbage. Their relationships with men are transaction-based at best and emotionally eviscerating at worst, and it doesn’t seem like any of them have great family relationships. That’s where the show will need to concentrate if it wants to improve on the “girls behaving badly” theme.

If the first episode was supposed to be funny, there was little evidence of that. Maybe it was lost in the translation from French to English. But most of the humor just comes from antisocial behavior, mostly on the part of Ada, that’s more depressing than funny. Only when Carola started hyperventilating when her issues with Keven finally came out did we understand what the show is really going to be about.

We hope we see more of that, and more of the parts of Montreal you don’t see when you visit the Old City or go get some smoked meat at Schwartz’ Deli. People down here in the states might not realize that, yes, Canadian cities are multi-ethnic, and have the same socioeconomic strata as other cities. And just like shows like The Eddy that show that there’s a drab part of Paris that people want to leave, Can You Hear Me? shows the same thing with Montreal. And even to someone who has visited the city many times, it was an eye-opening and refreshing look at a place we thought we were familiar with.

Sex and Skin: Other than Ada getting plowed in the back of a van by a guy who owes her 20 bucks, and talk that Ada might possibly have jizz in her hair, there isn’t much of anything else. And what we just described wasn’t exactly sexy.

Parting Shot: Ada gets on Carola’s lap in the car and tries to get her to breathe and calm down. Fabiola starts singing “Amazing Grace”, and Ada keeps telling her to stop.

Sleeper Star: We’ll withhold this one, because we’ll be seeing more people in the women’s worlds as the series goes along. The first episode more or less concentrates on the friends as an introduction.

Most Pilot-y Line: As they’re all making jokes about what might be jizz in Ada’s hair, Ada just comes right out and says “Penis juice. Big, fat, ugly dick juice!” with enthusiasm. Fabiola stops and calls her vulgar. We tend to agree.

Our Call: STREAM IT, but only because the chemistry among the three stars is pretty good and we’re hoping that the show will go a bit deeper in future episodes. The first episode isn’t promising, though.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.

Stream Can You Hear Me? On Netflix