Teresa Reviews Boarding School Murders (2023)

Teresa Reviews Boarding School Murders (2023) from Les Petits Meurtres and found it a sad sendoff to a surprising engaging season.

Original title: “Meurtres au Pensionnat”

(c)2024 by Teresa Peschel

Agatha adjacent? 2 knives
Rose and Julie reenact Gwenda and Leonie’s life-defining moments from Sleeping Murder, along with some twisted love.

Quality of movie: 2 knives
What a mess; too much plot, characters acting out of character, unfunny scenes that were supposed to be funny.

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

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

What a sad ending this is to a rejuvenated series. I’d gotten to hate Les Petits Season Two with its badly underwritten scripts stuffing in too much plot that got ignored, characters being deliberately stupid for the sake of the plot, no sense of continuity from previous episodes, and most of all, Laurence being as toxic as possible, Marléne being made stupid, and Avril looking to score points rather than solve murders. It was like French Keystone Kops set in a French junior high school.

I didn’t know what to expect from Season Three, with Gréco, Beretta, and Rose Bellecour in a ’70s setting but overall, it’s been good to very good. Leaving Agatha’s plots behind meant they weren’t constrained by someone else’s story and didn’t have to shoehorn in their leads.

But here we are at the last episode and we’re back with the French Keystone Kops, Rose becoming deliberately stupid ala Avril, and it takes place at an exclusive boarding school where the uniformed students behave like drunken barbarians sacking a classroom.

It’s not junior high; the student body is too mature for that. They all look about 17 and are ready to get on with drinking and sex. The headmistress, Madame LaRoche, is oblivious to their behavior. Among the very few instructors supposedly running the asylum, at least the science teacher, M. Fréchard, doesn’t take that crap from the kids, even if he is an unpleasant, secret drunk.

Naturally, at what amounts to a reform school for rich kids, you expect a body to turn up and it does. Rose, who graduated from the boarding school twelve years ago, is asked back by the new literature teacher, Julie Froment. Julie had been a major mean girl bully to Rose all those years ago, but Rose is the only Freudian psychologist Julie knows. How did Julie know? From the alumni newsletter, I guess, since you aren’t told otherwise how Julie knows, especially as she’s only been in Lille and at the school for two years after teaching in Normandy but what you are told is the girls hated each other. They didn’t stay in touch.

But Julie needs someone to talk to, Rose is a shrink who’s familiar with the school, and Julie assumes the lure of lecturing to a captive audience about the subconscious is too good to pass up. Julie’s right. That night, while drinking in her room at the school — just like high school! — Julie confesses her real reason. Since returning to Le Cascades, she’s been enduring nightmares about seeing a body being buried on the grounds of the school.
Was there a murder in her past?

They fall asleep and when Rose wakes up in the morning, she discovers Julie stabbed to death in bed right next to her. And when Gréco and Blum arrive, Blum finds the knife in Rose’s Chanel handbag. Where’s Beretta? Hiding in his yellow Renault because schools make him faint and panic. Gréco allows a hardboiled professional officer of the law to hide in his car like a squeamish rabbit. This worked out for plot purposes as it allowed him to infiltrate the school later disguised as a hired-in-a-hurry literature teacher, but it was asinine. Beretta regularly attends gruesome crime scenes, yet the script expected me to believe he couldn’t suck it up and do his job.
Naturally, our gang decides Rose couldn’t have murdered Julie although Gréco is forced to go with the evidence that yes, she did. It’s Blum who spirits Rose out of the police station in a body bag and no one questions why the coroner, a professional, is handling a body in such an unprofessional manner.

Rose initially hides out at Beretta’s place where she’s swiftly discovered by Gréco. Who then moves her to her hippie hotel where she’s staying! Despite knowing this is illegal, makes the public doubt the efficiency and competence of the police force, and ensures whatever evidence she does uncover won’t stand up in a court of law. I don’t think French courts are that different, even in the swinging, footloose ’70s.

Meanwhile Legoff is exhibiting serious mommy issues, making me wonder why he was ever taken seriously as a detective and wonder even more how he ended up in charge of a major, metropolitan police department. The Peter Principle in action? And, despite Legoff knowing Rose personally and having used her psychological services, he’s ready to railroad her into jail without bothering to see if there’s a reason. Like, you know, investigating the school’s background to see if there had been an incident in the past, based on Rose’s testimony.

There was one. A student named Irene had disappeared. Since her body was never found, she was declared a runaway. Keep in mind that this would have taken place in 1962 when nice girls from good families didn’t run off with boys and Laurence was running the joint and Irene’s parents were convinced something awful had happened and had the money and clout to get an investigation. But nothing.

And Rose’s testimony? She got stupid on par with Avril. When the series began, it was hard to take her mod self seriously, but each time she came on stage, she was professional and smart. But over time, she’s gotten stupid when the plot demanded it. This time? She’s decided that she was a murderer, that her subconscious made her do it. When Yvan LaRoche is found dead, his head smashed in, she decides she did that too. She’s a serial killer! And when she retrieves her memories of that fateful night long ago, she backs off telling Gréco what she remembered because the plot insisted.

Heaven forbid she should admit she liked the bad boy and heaven forbid the time saved could have been used to explain more about M. Fréchard, why Julie took a job at Le Cascades, Professor Claire who was willing to twist her words in front of witnesses, Beretta taming his classroom full of hooligans the way only Beretta could instead of wimping out like we saw, and most of all how Madame LaRoche managed to cover up losing a rich girl student with no backlash. Oh, and how about more with Remy, the present-day hooligan who threatened Julie and got away with it? What kind of school does Madame LaRoche run? Like Legoff, she seems to have ended up in her position via the Peter Principle.

What does this mess have to do with Agatha? Sleeping Murder gives you the answers. Gwenda, like Rose, saw a murder but blanked it from her mind for years. Swiss nanny Leonie, like Julie, saw a body being buried at night for suspicious reasons. Like Leonie, Julie was murdered when the murderer thought she was getting too close.

Most of all is the twisted love at the heart of the story. Dr. Kennedy murdered his half-sister Helen because he didn’t want anyone else to have her. Madam LaRoche murdered Irene all those years ago because her darling son raped Irene and she wasn’t about to turn him in based on some traumatized student’s say-so. She murdered Julie because she was starting to remember. She murdered her own son, kind of by accident, because she needed to cover up her other two murders.

It’s not exactly The Duchess of Malfi. Nor is it much like Agatha who would have spent more time on plot and less on Rose, Gréco, Beretta, Blum, and Legoff making fools of themselves.