Saturday the 12th of September, France 5 trained its lens on Saint-Tropez. Not the eight-deck yachts, not the restaurants with price tags that make your eyes water. The other one.
Échappées Belles handed the village to presenter Jérôme Pitorin for an evening broadcast. The format is simple: one weekend, one destination, encounters with the people who live there. And this time, the camera tried to get under the surface rather than skim it.
The episode moves from the lanes of the old port out to the trails of the massif des Maures. Along the way, Pitorin meets Tropéziens across several generations, people still holding onto traditions that the season, every summer, edges a little closer to swallowing whole. People who actually live in the village year-round, which is rarer than it sounds when you consider what a studio costs off-season.
Filming Saint-Tropez without sliding into promotional gloss or the tired nostalgia of those who miss the village before Bardot arrived is a genuinely difficult thing. Pitorin handles it with his usual unhurried tone. The episode is still available as a replay on France.tv for anyone who missed the broadcast.
