Teresa Reviews “Family Murder Party” (2006)

Teresa Reviews “Family Murder Party” (2006) (a.k.a. Petits meurtres en famille) and loved this bloody six-hour soap opera despite the absence of Poirot.

Source: Amazon DVD

Fidelity to text: 3 straight razors

Poirot’s gone, the plot’s as soapy as can be, but motive and family ties remain

Quality of movie on its own: 4 straight razors

Well-paced, most of the loose ends tied up, but they skipped Inès’ happy ending and that chirpy score! Bleah.

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

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

This long miniseries (6 hours, 20 minutes) is broken up into four 95-minute episodes. The script, casting, and direction all work together so you can keep the huge cast straight but I’d still recommend you watch it as a marathon over two nights.

The film is based upon Hercule Poirot’s Christmas and, despite removing Poirot and turning it into a police procedural set in Northern France near the Belgian border in 1939, everything you’d expect (and more!) is here.

Vicious, tyrannical, aging family patriarch? Check. Dysfunctional adult sons who don’t get along? All but David are here. Their wives? Yep, for the most part. Illegitimate son from Africa? He’s here (Éloi) but the parallel isn’t exact. Long-estranged granddaughter who turns out to be an imposter? She’s here. So is the police superintendent who’s another unacknowledged, illegitimate son but he loathes the old man. Château full of snoopy servants? Fifteen or more are keeping that pile up to standards.

And is the vicious old man, who’s proud of making people hate him, slaughtered in a locked room mystery? Yes, he is.

The changes omit David the artist son, and add layer upon layer of soapy froth. It’s like Dynasty, only despite everyone being rich and French, they aren’t as spectacularly dressed and it’s clear the château isn’t as grand as it could be.

The added soap? Édouard is married to Édith. He adores her. She’s only got eyes for Édouard’s athletic brother, Victor. Victor’s her age and, supposedly unbeknownst to Édouard, Victor’s the father of their daughter, Alix.

Antonin is a widower who’s been carrying on a ten-year long affair with head housekeeper, Louise. She’s just discovered she’s pregnant with his illegitimate baby. Like father, like son, yes?

Antonin is a politician so he needs a wife but Louise is a domestic (quelle horreur!) and worse, a Jew. So Antonin, when summoned home for the old man’s 70th birthday party, brings his fiancée, Madeline. She’s a singer, actress, bombshell blonde. She starts out as high-maintenance and ends up in crazy town.

Victor’s estranged from the family and has been since age 17 when he a) had the secret affair with older brother Édouard’s wife and b) decided upon finding his mother’s crumpled body outside one of the château’s third floor window that papa pushed maman out the window. Upon his return for the old man’s 70th birthday party, Victor resumes his affair with Édith and confronts his father about maman’s death.

Alix, Édouard and Édith’s 16-year-old daughter overhears the truth about her parentage and rips into all three adults for their lies.

Inès, the Spanish granddaughter of Simon’s estranged daughter is an imposter but that’s not the soap. No, it’s Diego, the real Inès’ driver, the fake Inès’ lover (until she learns what a vicious-tempered abusive jerk he is) who forces her to take the real Inès’ place so they can rob the château. Diego is also a Spanish Republican, loyal to the Communists, and he can’t go back to Franco’s Spain. He and Richard blackmail her when it seems that she might be developing a conscience.

Louise, head housekeeper’s been carrying a torch for Antonin for ten years. She’s happy to be pregnant because as we eventually learn, she’s got another son by Antonin whom she gave up nine years ago.

Louise is being pursued, very discreetly from afar, by Mr. Paul, the butler. He’s a widower with an estranged son (Richard) who’s not just the château’s dogsbody, but also a thief. Richard, it turns out, knows our eager young police inspector, Lampion.

Simon’s not the only person who dies. So does Édouard (accidentally pushed over a cliff by his hated brother) and Madame Dupré, the château’s chef of fifty years. She’s poisoned and then shot so she can’t tell what she knows.

Éloi, the young doctor from the Ivory Coast, is supposed to be the son of Simon’s old friend but he turns out to be Simon’s illegitimate son. He’s unlike Simon or his half-brothers because he’s rational, calm, and very capable. He falls madly in love with Inès but pushes her away, convinced that it would be incest.

The staff at the château have a close-up view of the goings-on. This is the first adaptation I’ve seen that makes it clear how much staff is needed to run a castle. The butler, the head housekeeper who’s got four maids working for her, the chef with her four kitchen-maids, Simon’s valet (we never see anyone else’s valets or lady’s maid but I assure you, they’re there), Richard the dogsbody, at least one gardener, a stableman or two, and the gamekeeper with the dogs. At least fifteen servants sit for the servants’ dinner before the family gets their fancier dinner.
The entire crowd gets plenty of screentime to tell their interlocking stories.

There’s also Superintendent Larosière and his eager young assistant, Émile Lampion. Since Poirot’s gone and the story’s become a police procedural, they do everything that Poirot did. But wait, you ask. Wasn’t it a police superintendent who actually murdered the old man by cutting his throat and faking the locked room mystery?

Yes, it was, and it still is. Knowing the story made it fascinating to watch Larosière investigate while turning the clues the way he wanted them to go. Watch carefully and you’ll see him distract Lampion whenever his young partner starts to see the truth. He choses and discards patsies to blame and finally settles on Inès. She’s not just foreign. She’s an imposter so no one will come to her rescue.

Although this mini-series features Larosière and Lampion and is set on France’s northern coast like season One of Les Petits Meurtres d’Agatha Christie, they are unrelated and not just because Larosière is the murderer. The miniseries is set in January/February 1939 instead of 1935 (Pope Pius XI dies so you can pinpoint the date) and everyone in France is anxious about what’s coming. Whether you’re high or low status, Hitler is a topic of conversation.

What I did not like was how the mini-series ignored Inès when they summed up everyone else’s future. She got plenty of screentime, from riding with the real Inès and worrying about the future as they escape Spain to meeting Éloi in town to waking up in the hospital after the car accident (not well scripted or shot) to Diego forcing her to take the real Inès’ place and her subsequent interactions with the family. And then being accused of murder and locked up!

Yet her and Éloi’s ending consists of standing in the background under a black umbrella during the funeral. Everyone else, including minor servants, got their ending. Not her or Éloi. But that should be expected. They weren’t French and so when the production company ran out of film, shooting endless minutes of Alix riding on the beach, they got the chop.

Watch this one anyway and give Inès and Éloi their happy ending. They earned it.