Teresa Reviews Endless Night (2021)

Teresa reviews Endless Night (2021), the first episode of a new season from Les Petits Muertres and found it a disco-era update with one major difference.

(La Nuit Qui ne Finit Pas / The Night That Never Ends)

(c)2024 by Teresa Peschel

Fidelity to text: 2 guns

The hidden couple murder the dumb, naïve, rich girl. But this Mike Rogers never falls in love with his victim, removing the novel’s tragic heart.

Quality of movie: 3 guns

Considering the film had to introduce an entirely new and much larger cast, they did a decent job packing it all in.

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

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

Endless Night is not an easy novel to adapt to film. It’s narrated by an ordinary young man telling his story of love, loss, and his dream home, but at the twist climax, you realize everything he told you was a lie. Alongside Dr. Shepherd in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Mike Rogers is whose picture you see for the dictionary definition of “unreliable narrator.”

You cannot assume anything he says is true, including the color of the sky. He doesn’t just lie overtly. He lies with the truth. He lies by omitting important details. He lies by telling you what you need to hear and want to believe and so you do.

How do you film a book when you can’t believe anything you hear from our hero? The 1972 film did a good job and each time I rewatch it or I see one of the other adaptions, I’m more impressed. It tells the story from Mike’s point of view, like the novel. You get inside his head. You feel what he feels, including his descent into madness and his grief when he realizes that he murdered his true love (Ellie) to please his false love (Greta). But is that a lie too, designed to save himself from the hangman’s noose?

About the 2013 version, which shoved Miss Marple into a story that was never hers, the less said the better. But, despite the deep structural flaw of being two movies forcibly edited into one, it kept Mike Rogers’ character. He’s dreamy, he wants what he wants without working for it, he’s more than willing to murder to get what he wants, and he realizes too late he loved Ellie deeply; far more than he loved his false lover, Greta.

And thus, we arrive at the Les Petits Muertres version of Endless Night. As you should expect by now, the show’s writers rewrote it substantially. What you may not have expected is the entire cast changed radically and the Lille police department has wholeheartedly leaped into the ’70s. Full on ’70s. Like, ’70s to the max such as you wouldn’t have seen at the time. In the real world, people can’t afford to replace everything in their homes, businesses, and cities. The show is saturated with mod clothes, hip cars, tie-dye, beads, extreme facial hair on any man hoping to be thought hip, micro-minis on women who insist they want to be taken seriously, and Day-Glo colors for everything.

Even the buildings got rebuilt. Commissaire Laurence would have had a stroke at how his office was redone into something from a Moebius comic in Heavy Metal / Métal hurlant showcasing a dystopian future that’s hard on the eyes and impossible to maintain. And Commissaire Larosière from the first series would be prostrate in the hospital bed next to him.

And if they recovered, they’ll relapse when they see the new sheriff in town. Annie Gréco is the first woman in France to assume the exalted position of Commissaire and so, naturally, rather than have her fail more publicly in Paris, she’s been sent to the backwater of Lille. This allows the Minister to claim he’s keeping up with the times while keeping her from public view. If Annie Gréco fails, well, it’s only to be expected. If Gréco succeeds, she’s stuck in Lille and no harm is done because no one will see her and start demanding women rise to higher positions in the police force in more important regions.

Annie Gréco isn’t a surprise as our new boss. The show wanted to go in a new direction and ensure you, dear viewer, didn’t confuse the ’70s with the late ’50s or the mid ’30s. Along with all the other dramatic changes in the ’70s, more and more women were taking on roles they had rarely assumed before. What’s surprising is Les Petits Muertres made her as ferociously capable as Laurence or Larosière.

The first season barely admitted the presence of women in the work force despite all those women waiting tables, managing cafés, cooking, cleaning, nursing, teaching school, etc., etc. The jobs that women have traditionally done and received no credit for them.

The second season gave us Marlène, one of the world’s most incompetent secretaries, and Avril, a reporter with no Nancy Drew skills whatsoever and no understanding of how a newspaper works. Almost without exception, the women in Season Two were written to demonstrate why so many men thought women should stick to waiting tables, managing cafés, cooking, cleaning, nursing, teaching school, and so forth.

Annie Gréco, at least in the opening episode, exudes competence and smarts. She’s also no raving beauty, being older and overweight. But she’s well-groomed, because it’s part of the job and part of how you get ahead. She’s a practical woman, using what works and discarding what doesn’t. That’s why, after putting the fear of God into the local yokels at the Lille police department, she selects the volatile detective Max Beretta as her assistant instead of one of them. He listens and shows as much respect to her as he does to everyone, which is to say, not much.

Is Max Beretta named after that most famous of ’70s American cops, Anthony Vincenzo Baretta? Baretta ran from 1975 to 1978. If you’re old enough, you can probably sing along to the theme song, “Keep Your Eye on the Sparrow.” American cop shows are one of our biggest exports, so maybe?

We swiftly meet Rose Bellecour, young shrink wearing a series of expensive, shrunken outfits. She’s the pampered daughter of a very rich couple. They want Rose to marry and produce grandchildren. She wants a career as a psychiatrist. Currently, she has about five patients, including Anna Miller (Ellie), a dumb, naïve, rich movie star. Rose is on the set the day the first murder takes place and she swiftly worms her way into the investigation. She impresses Gréco enough to demand Baretta go to therapy with her to work on his anger-management issues.

Other continuing characters get shoehorned in: Captain Legoff, the chief of police; Dr. Jacques Blum, pathologist; and Bob, hippie proprietor of Gréco’s residential hotel.

The rewrite of Endless Night changes it to center around Anna Miller, needy movie star. She’s got a scary and demanding ex-boyfriend who won’t take “no” for an answer. She’s got a super-helpful assistant, Solange (Greta) who sees to her every need. She’s got a wonderful new lover who is so wonderful that even though he was a bartender when they met, he’s her fiancé because no one else understands her every mood and whim like Tom (Mike).

If you’re looking for other parallels, you won’t find much. Tom’s mother shows up in a woefully underwritten part. She’s never given a chance to tell the detectives anything significant about Tom’s background.

Richard, Anna’s ex, is murdered early on. Because of the way his death is set up, the film doesn’t come across as a reworking of Endless Night. Even if you’re familiar with the novel, you won’t realize the parallels until about the halfway to two-thirds mark. Richard’s death is initially pinned on Anna.

There is no Santonix or a hidden past for Tom. Nor is there a parallel to Andrew Lippencott (Ellie’s lawyer) or Major Phillpot (Ellie and Mike’s neighbor). There could have been! Anna’s agent, Georges Daday could have been concerned about her wellbeing and suspicious of her quickie relationship with Tom. Instead, he’s been robbing her blind. Similarly, the film director, Claude Varlin, is indifferent to Anna’s struggles. His concern is getting his movie made and as long as Anna shows up on set, he doesn’t care what happens to her.

Gradually, as Gréco and Baretta investigate Richard Duval’s death, you’ll see Endless Night’s plot unfold. You’ll recognize Tom and Solange’s arguments for what they are: a deception. It culminates, naturally, in the reception for Anna and Tom’s wedding where we meet Tom’s mother for the first time. The reception ends badly when the bride throws herself out her second story window in her modernist horror of a house.

Gréco is under immense pressure to solve the high-profile case of a movie star. As the first woman commissaire in France, all eyes are on her. Yet when you expect clues such as the revealing photograph showing up, it’s not what you’d expect. Beretta indulges in police brutality with the photographer, who reveals that a shadow in the picture is not a compromising picture of Solange and Tom together, but Solange pushing Anna to her death. Gréco puts them together when she tells (you never see the proof) that the funeral guestbook showed Solange starting to write her last name with a capital M, then scratching it out and replacing it with the last name the police know. Pretty flimsy, compared to a photograph of Solange and Tom together. But it leads Gréco to searching the vital records (shades of Somerset House) and learning that Solange and Tom were married.

The ending is where this version of Endless Night falls apart. Mike Rogers realizes how much he loves Ellie. Tom Marsan couldn’t care less about Anna Miller. She was a patsy to be used. Tom murders Solange because she was feeling guilty, not because she pushed him too far. It was disappointing because Mike Rogers’ emotions about Ellie turn a routine wife-murder into something deeply tragic on multiple levels.

But not here.

The new ending does work within the context of the plot. The emotional resonance is missing, along with the intense deep dive into Mike Rogers. But it works well enough.