Teresa Reviews “Innocent Lies” (1995): Toward Zero Counted Out

Fidelity to text: 1/2 gun.

There are similar incidents, particularly a young boy being shot by another young boy with a bow and arrow. Otherwise, nothing, zip, nada, not even the names match and for good reason, too.

Quality of movie on its own: 1/2 gun.

The house looks great! It’s a piece of Modernist architecture — I guarantee the roof leaks — on the French coastline with a great collection of pre-WWII modern art. Nice clothes too, along with 1938 vintage cars and scenery I haven’t seen a thousand times before. Otherwise, it’s dreadful.

Well, folks, Bill and I took one for the team when we sat through this train wreck. Why did we watch a (deservedly) obscure French film as part of the Agatha Christie movie project?

Because Innocent Lies began as a French interpretation of Agatha’s great 1944 classic Towards Zero. This stunning novel has yet to be filmed in English in anything close to the original text. The closest we get is the Marple adaptation of 2007 with Geraldine McEwan as Miss Marple. I’m dreading that one. If you’ve read the novel, you know that our detective hero is the criminally underused Inspector Battle. You also know he’s not Miss Marple in drag.

But I digress. It must be from having my brain put through a blender.

Some history first. Innocent Lies was supposed to be Towards Zero. The screenwriters decided that the text wasn’t exciting enough and that they could do better than Agatha. Apparently, there wasn’t enough incest in the novel. When Rosalind Hicks (Agatha’s daughter) saw the script, she demanded that the producers remove all references to Agatha Christie and Towards Zero from every single part of the production including the advertising. All the settings, characters, and place names had to be changed as well. Even the date gets altered to 1938. The only mention you’ll see is the last line on the closing credits where the producers admit that they were “inspired” by Agatha Christie but the film has nothing whatsoever to do with her or her books. The Christie Estate disavowed the film.

So going in, we knew we were going to be disappointed. Sadly, we were wrong.

It was even worse than expected.

French films like being arty and vague and this one is arty and vague in spades. It’s beautifully framed and shot, yet as a viewer, the story they were telling was incoherent. Entire subplots arose and vanished without explanation.

Even the murder that starts the show is never explained! Who murdered the snoopy British Inspector? How was it committed? Who knows? Who cares? Not the director or the scriptwriter.

Did anyone associated with the film ever speak with actual French policemen to discover how the French police solve crimes? Obviously not, when the local inspector’s civilian daughter is the one working on the case. Is this because she can speak English? No, because the inspector can too, as he demonstrates during his speech to the interfering inspector from Scotland Yard.

Could Scotland Yard inspectors be as incompetent as our hero, Alan Cross (played by Adrian Dunbar; sure hope he earned a big check for this role)? I don’t see how. Inspector Cross brought his eight-year-old daughter across the channel to the crime scene — on the eve of what everyone knew was going to be a future battle zone — because he couldn’t find anyone in the whole of England to watch the kid. Or maybe it was an early version of “Take Your Daughter to Work Day.” He becomes obsessed with our heroine (Celia) to the point of trying to cover up murder. He has sex with the suspect while interrogating her!

I don’t know why he became obsessed when Gabrielle Anwar portrays Celia as a thumb-sucking black hole into which emotions could be poured forever. The French inspector’s daughter was far more vivid and alive. Don’t expect to recognize Kiera Knightly. She’s got a bit part as eight-year-old Celia. She might have said one word.

Then there’s the whole incest plot. Brother Jeremy and sister Celia apparently murdered Jeremy’s twin brother as little kids while playing William Tell. The murdered twin brother is so negligible and unimportant a human being that he isn’t even named. By anyone, including the scriptwriter. I checked Internet Movie Database to be sure and yep, no name. That murder (it was fun!) leads directly to the obsessed passionate love affair between brother and sister.

Yeah. Sure.

This main plot is relatively clear. You’ll want to take a shower afterwards to wash off both the ickiness and the stupidity but you can sort of follow it.

Then we get the subplots. There’s Jeremy’s wife, who’s Jewish and trying to save her parents from Nazi Germany. She vanishes, presumably with her parents. Did they escape? Why did Jeremy marry her? Why did she marry him? We’re never given answers.

Celia’s fiancé number two (fiancé number one committed suicide when he was treated to a front-row seat exhibition of the depths of Celia’s and Jeremy’s twisted affair) just walks away, abandoning Celia to her fate. He was the smartest person onscreen by miles. He was going to marry this girl in six days! He doesn’t (I think) get to watch Celia and Jeremy in action but even so, he’s there and then suddenly he’s not. Walking away was the smart move, but it sure doesn’t imply that he loved Celia.

Angela, Alan Cross’s daughter, fills no purpose onscreen at all other than to show that he’s as incompetent a father as he is an inspector with Scotland Yard. She’s got plenty of obscure, arty screen time, playing with dolls and seashells, and watching her father boink Celia (at least he stopped when he realized that).

Why? To show innocence maybe? The kind of innocence that French filmmakers love to corrupt as quickly as possible because they’re deviant perverts? After all, you have to demonstrate your modern ways of thinking somehow. This lets you have it both ways: you enjoy corrupting minors while saying tsk-tsk.

How about Lady Helena Graves (Joanna Lumley who’s also Dolly Bantry in the Marple series)? She’s flirting with the Nazis. That could have been more interesting, but it’s brushed aside. She’s also apparently covering up Jeremy’s other nasty actions, but this plot thread vanishes too.

There are refugees. There’s the threat of war looming over the horizon. Everyone is afraid of what’s coming. It’s background noise. I suppose the purpose was to show how self-centered and oblivious our characters were.

Four murders were committed. Young boy with bow and arrow. We get a sort of explanation. Fiancé number one is killed in a highly suspicious car accident. We get a sort of explanation but it’s hard to buy. You see something icky (before you marry that crazy girl so you should be counting your lucky stars and buying lottery tickets) so you drive your car into a tree? Sure. Whatever. The prying British inspector is shot. We never get an explanation of how or why, despite the camera lingering on his body and particularly on his untied shoes. Huh? Lady Helena is found dead. That murder we get shown in flashback in all its gory detail. I would have preferred less flashbacks and more minutes devoted to solving the Inspector’s murder.

None of the story made sense. Loads of arty flashbacks did not advance the plot although they did demonstrate that the house has a truly marvelous conservatory that must be cared for by an army of gardeners. Everyone behaved as if they’d never heard of rational thought or decent behavior or understood how police investigations are actually performed. The movie was 88 minutes long and it dragged. Even so, I’d have sat through another ten minutes if they had explained what the heck was going on.

The house was nice though. It’s a piece of modernist architecture loaded with contemporary (for 1938) cutting-edge modern art and a conservatory on par with Longwood Gardens. Looking at the house’s roofline, I guarantee it leaks. I know the conservatory does, because they always do. Maybe mold and mildew infiltrated the house and damaged the brains of everyone living there.

Do not bother watching this film. If you are an Agatha Christie film buff and are watching every film associated with her for completeness’s sake, think very, very hard before sliding this disk into the DVD player. There is no brain bleach to scrub away the fact that you wasted 88 minutes of your life back on this.

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