Teresa Reviews Associés contre le crime (2012): The Ambroise Egg

Teresa reviews Associés contre le crime (2012) (aka Partners in Crime) and thought the Tommy and Tuppence movie struggled with three unrelated stories

Source: DVD bought from Amazon

(c)2023 by Teresa Peschel

Fidelity to text: 1 drowning victim
You’ll recognize the set up where T&T get handed a detective agency and a man shows up looking for his missing fiancée. After that? Nothing.

Quality of movie: 1½ drowning victims
This might be better but only if you speak French and understand French cultural references. Might.

What a disappointment. We really enjoyed Pascal Thomas’s first outing with a very, very French Tommy and Tuppence in Mon Petit Doight M’a dit… (By the Pricking of My Thumbs, 2005).

We’ve heard good things about his second T&T outing: Le Crime est notre affaire Crime is Our Business from 2008) which is a loose reworking of 4.50 From Paddington. Unrelated to either the Beresfords or Miss Marple, he also filmed L’Heure zero in 2007, a faithful reworking of Towards Zero.

We haven’t seen either film to confirm what we’ve heard. Alas, the vagaries of marketing have interfered. They’re French movies so I need to have them available in the U.S. and they must have English subtitles. If either of those necessities aren’t met, we can’t watch the film and I can’t review it. Hey production company! You’re leaving money on the table when you don’t make your films available to a wider audience.

What makes this still sadder is that this disappointment should have remained sequestered in France. I guess French audiences like it? Or maybe not. Pascal Thomas didn’t film any other T&T adventures after this flat soufflé.

It’s possible — due to the language and cultural barriers — I missed all kinds of jokes, especially the visual ones.

As an example, there’s a scene early on when Tommy is at a class in plein-air painting. This should be a landscape, yes? Except the pack of students dutifully slaving over their easels are painting a naked woman, artfully posed with a javelin, standing in that scenic pasture.

Tommy paints her and the tree nearby. The artist/instructor is duly impressed. Is this the joke, that Tommy painted the tree as well as the nekkid brunette? No, it’s not. Or maybe it was. But the intended joke seems to be the artist. He’s not just a parody of everyone’s image of a painter, complete with wild hair and splattered smock. The actor’s name is Gustave Courbet so Pascal Thomas ended the scene with the painting instructor clutching his face in desperation.

Huh? You forgot your art history classes? I did and I took a year of it in college! Gustave Courbet (1819 – 1877) is also the name of a famous French painter who in 1845 painted his self-portrait in exactly that crazed pose with that manic expression. I’m sure well-educated French audiences were rolling on the floor. For us, it completely passed us by. How did we find out? By accident, when Bill made out the cast list after the fact, thought the name looked vaguely familiar, and looked it up.

It’s quite likely The Ambroise Egg is loaded with jokes like this, when you consider how bizarre many of the visuals are.

By now, if you’re familiar with T&T’s Partners in Crime, you’re wondering what plein-air painting has to do with the story “The Missing Lady.” Nothing! Absolutely nothing!

What makes this so frustrating is the film started promisingly. Tommy’s written a bestselling memoir, detailing his escapades. His editor wrote out Tuppence’s share of the adventures and she’s left sitting around at the mobbed author events, treated like the help. When the General offers her (not Tommy!) a detective agency, she leaps at the chance to do something more exciting than gazing in adoration at Tommy at a book signing.

Their first case sounds even more promising and familiar. James van Luyderkerke walks in, desperate to find his fiancée, Mlle. Sakhaline. Tuppence knows who he is from her extensive readings of the social columns. Tommy, bored with janitorial duties in the new office, suggests that Mlle. Sakhaline might be at the Phoenix Clinic.

So far, so good, right? And then the plot goes off the rails completely. Their worthless son-in-law has moved in with his twin boys because his wife, their daughter, has vanished. Does Tuppence use her detective skills to reunite the family? Hah!

She visits her father but he’s not a vicar anymore. He’s a trapeze artist and owns a traveling circus! Does the plot do anything with that? As if.

Tuppence infiltrates the Phoenix Clinic. It’s very suspicious. It’s also bizarre, but that might be the only-in-France jokes. She locates Mlle. Sakhaline but it’s her mother! So Tuppence quits the detective agency and never contacts her client, James van Luyderkerke, with her findings. He never shows up again.

But there are strange things going on at the Phoenix Clinic. The young Vietnamese staffer shadows them and begs for help to find her missing mentor, Dr. Lanson. He’s discovered the secret of eternal youth and she’s 82 years old. Mlle Sakhaline’s mother? That was the young mademoiselle, but aged by a treatment gone wrong. The other doctors at the clinic are trying to get the secret formula and need to be stopped!

So it’s back to the Phoenix Clinic, but this time with both T&T in disguise. He’s recognized because of the publicity from his book tour. They spy and pry and meet very strange people, undergoing only-in-France beauty treatments, but nothing comes of it. Until Tuppence wakes from a nightmare to see the Vietnamese staffer drowned in the swimming pool. By the time they get to the pool, the body’s gone and no one, naturally, has seen a thing.

They find the body in Dr. Lanson’s secret lair, then locate the mystery key to a railway storage locker where the magic egg is hidden.

Tommy is captured and miraculously escapes. But during his escape, another piece of bizarreness occurs. While escaping, he stabs the goon with a hypodermic needle loaded with narcotics. The goon goes to sleep. Then he deflates like a failed soufflé. Just slumps to the floor, folding in on himself. You’re left watching and saying what? What? But you won’t get an answer. Ever.

They save the magic egg, but can’t figure out what it does.

Then, after a liquid lunch, they’re driving around past gorgeous fields of wildflowers and Tommy plays with the egg. He suddenly unscrews it and seconds later, Tuppence is stopped by the police for drunk driving. But Tommy’s not there. He’s been youthened into a baby, but still with his functioning brain. His clothes shrank too.

It seems the magic egg only operates if it’s over top of a space-time continuum fault line and these only show up when the plot demands one.

More disjointed foolishness, including their daughter suddenly showing up at the circus, reunited with her husband and kids, when Tuppence goes there with baby Tommy for her father’s birthday party.

Does Tommy need to return to get the plot back on track? Does the plot need a piss-joke? Yes to both questions.

Eventually, Tommy and Tuppence encounter the villainous spa doctors again. Justice triumphs, mainly because the spa doctors are completely incompetent as supervillains.

When the general returns for the summing up, everyone agrees that Dr. Lanson was a very competent charlatan, fooling everyone. Except T&T know the egg’s effects are real. And, when the egg operates one last time, they’re unconcerned because that bratty kid turned into an old geezer had it coming.

Miss Marple has sometimes compared untangling motives and methods to unsnarling a great heap of yarn into neat skeins, sorted by color. This film — lovely to look at — is so jumbled and mixed-up that there’s enough plot for three separate movies going on but here, they’re not knitted into so much as a potholder.

Read more of Teresa’s Agatha Christie movie reviews at Peschel Press.

Also, follow Teresa’s discussion of these movie on her podcast.