Teresa Reviews A Crazy Case (2019)
Teresa reviews A Crazy Case (2019) an adaptation of “Evil Under the Sun” for Les Petits Meurtres d’Agatha Christie but set at a psychiatric clinic.
French title: Ding Dingue Dong
(c)2023 by Teresa Peschel
Fidelity to text: 2½ stranglers
Despite the changes, the core plot remains. A couple hides behind a façade, timing isn’t what it seems, and that body isn’t who Marlène thought it was.
Quality of film: 3 stranglers
I’d have given it 3½, but the film’s editor disappeared at the climax, leaving behind a choppy, incoherent mess.
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You’re along for the ride in the loony bin, meeting loony patients and their not-quite-all-there doctors, and enjoying seeing Laurence being made a fool of when wham; you’re hit upside the head when Laurence corrals everyone in Dr. Rodier’s (Kenneth Marshall) office and suddenly, Marlène changes clothes and is running around outside and we’ve gone back in time as Laurence reveals what actually happened as opposed to what everyone thought happened.
The editing was so choppy that I thought our library DVD skipped a scene. It didn’t. Instead, the crucial detail of Laurence saying “This is what happened” during his explanation didn’t appear. Your sole clue is Marlene’s new outfit and her suddenly chasing a stranger through the overgrown field to the abandoned shack on the grounds of the loony bin when the scene throws itself from a paneled doctor’s office to the great outdoors.
By now you must be wondering what Ding Dingue Dong has in common with Evil Under the Sun. Believe it or not, it’s the same plot despite taking place in an exclusive French asylum as opposed to an exclusive English seaside resort.
How is this possible? Let’s find out!
We open at night at the front gates to Clinique des Lilas, yet another Lille institution hiding dark secrets. Laurence is dropping off a hot blonde after their date. He apparently took last episode (Mélodie Mortelle) and Dr. Maillol’s advice from beyond the grave to heart and has moved on from maundering on about her.
The next morning, Marlène staggers in to work. She’s late, disheveled, and deeply depressed. Perhaps Dr. Maillol — they didn’t get along but solidarity in sisterhood and all that — sent her dream messages that Laurence had moved past his lost love with her and instead of seeing wonderful Marlène right in front of him, was hooking up with random bimbos in expensive hotel rooms.
I can’t come up with another explanation for why Marlène — the epitome of elegance, topnotch grooming, and an overall cheery disposition no matter what — should have gone off the deep end, other than the script made her do it. She’s not even wearing lipstick!
Laurence, Tricard, Glissant, and Avril are deeply concerned, as well they should be. Laurence wants the best care for Marlène possible. At about the same time, a patient at Clinique des Lilas is discovered hanging from the ceiling in an examination room, an apparent suicide.
Dr. Glissant discovers that Anatole the suicide had a suspiciously large amount of morphine in him. Could it be murder? Either way, a room at the clinic has become available and Marlène moves in.
The plot thickens as Marlène struggles to adjust to her new home, surrounded by a cast of characters not out of The Snake Pit (1948) as this asylum is far more exclusive. The patients’ families pay a lot for them to be attended to by Dr. Rodier and Dr. Steiner (Patrick Redfern). Despite this reassurance from the good doctor, you’ll still wonder who paid the bills for Anatole (who clearly wasn’t getting enough supervision if he hung himself), why the extensive grounds include that field with the rundown shack, and why the asylum is so short-staffed that Dr. Rodier hires Avril as a nurse without doing even the most cursory of background checks, like, you know, reading an issue of La Voix du Nord where he’d see her regular byline and picture.
But not seeing what’s in front of him is part and parcel of Dr. Rodier’s personality. It’s why he doesn’t notice that his daughter, Adèle (Linda Marshall) is more than an angsty teen. She’s been cutting herself on both wrists, and she doesn’t do much to hide it. Adèle loathes stepmother Clarisse (Arlena Marshall). You eventually learn that Rodier knows Clarisse is cheating on him, and with more than one man, too.
Since Clarisse is a hot, blonde bombshell, you won’t be surprised when it turns out that she’s the blonde bimbo Laurence was trysting with to get over Dr. Maillol. He’s just another in a string of her lovers. She can land them, but it becomes clear that she can’t hold onto them.
At the asylum, Marlène gets to know Dr. Steiner and his wife, Marie (Christine Redfern). He takes an interest in her, enough to go walking in the woods with her on Sunday instead of spending it in church with his wife. To Marlène’s horror, they come across the murdered body of Clarisse, sprawled in the field in front of the dilapidated shack.
Despite her depression, Marlène has absorbed enough police work to note the time (the church bells rang) as she stumbles back for help. With a murderer on the loose at the asylum, Laurence gets himself committed as a not-too-violent patient to keep an eye on Marlène. He can’t investigate any other way, because it was revealed that he was trysting with the blonde victim. Getting committed is his only way in. He doesn’t do a good job of sleuthing or protecting Marlène because heavy doses of happy pills makes him nearly comatose.
It’s state of the art psychiatric care in the French provinces in 1962.
His inability to investigate, coupled with Tricard’s hapless detecting is why Avril signs on as a nurse/intern. She promptly falls madly in love with Dr. Rodier and bonds with his daughter. Head nurse Dominique Lebrun is also madly in love with Dr. Rodier but alas, she’s stout and brunette and age-appropriate so why would Dr. Rodier notice that she’s a capable, caring woman? She’s not hot and that’s what counts. Told you he didn’t see what was right in front of his nose.
Dr. Rodier might have known that Clarisse was rich (possibly another reason to marry her over and above her hotness) but he, true to form, doesn’t understand that she’s been making big cash withdrawals from her account. Police work takes place offscreen leading to this conclusion. Why was Clarisse taking out money? Was it blackmail? Or was it something else, such as making big payments to keep a lover she couldn’t hang on to any other way?
You won’t get a clear answer to this point. You also don’t get a clear answer as to why, if Dr. Rodier charges as much as he does, patient Félix is still able to score his regular fix of cocaine by visiting the same rundown shack that Clarisse uses for her trysts. And where did Félix get the money from? No answer there either.
What happens next? Does Avril run off with Dr. Rodier? That’s left up in the air big time but I can make a logical guess: the very next episode will begin with her again alone again and looking for love in all the wrong places.
Kind of like Laurence, who never sees who is standing in front of him. Or Dr. Rodier.
