Teresa Reviews Hercule Poirot’s Christmas (2018)

Teresa Reviews Hercule Poirot’s Christmas (2018), the Les Petits Meurtres episode titled Murders on Sale, and found our three leads interfered which what should have been a great story.

(Also called in France Meurtres en solde)

Source: MHz channel on YouTube

(c)2023 by Teresa Peschel

Fidelity to text: 2 knives
The murder victim is hateful to everyone and people are not who they claim to be. Also, instead of a Christmas party, we’re at a department store in October.

Quality of movie: 2 knives
Awkward, clumsy, and long stretches of film wasted on watching Marlène, Avril and Laurence behave like fools instead of enjoying a well-thought-out mystery.

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

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

Les Petits Meurtres can do better than this. What makes this episode so irritating is there was so much material to work with and it was all jettisoned. This felt like a first draft. Three more passes on the script to heighten the mystery, play up the Krepps family, explain more about the relationships between Avril and Vivi, Mathilde and Thierry, Carpentier and the Krepps family would have done so much!

Instead, we got long chunks of idiot plot that make Marlène a complete fool, prove Avril doesn’t understand the first thing about her reporting job and has never read a Nancy Drew mystery, and Laurence is even more toxic than we thought. Which is saying something.

We’re given a date for this episode; a rarity in TV land where they try to remain timeless. Marilyn Monroe (1926-1962) committed suicide on Aug. 4 and two months later, Marlène is still mourning her idol with a shrine set up to Monroe’s memory next to her desk. Without a pinpointed date like this, you’d have to rely on the set designers and wardrobe as they subtlety change background details and clothes to get an idea that time has passed since the series began. Check out Francesca’s sheath dresses! Very chic and very modern.

The department store, Au Bon Temps, owned by a deeply dysfunctional family, is an interesting update on the English country house setting in the original novel. A big department store has dozens of people working for it with all the usual rivalries and jealousies, dislikes and favoritisms you’d expect in any large group of people. It also has a significant power hierarchy. The salesgirls are at the bottom of the heap. The floorwalkers and department heads are higher up, but still subordinate to management. Management in a family-owned department store means the patriarch who oversees every aspect of the store — think Sam Walton (1918-1992) who founded Wal-Mart — doles out the rewards and the punishments. This patriarch is usually the founder, or the founder’s child struggling to step out of his father’s shadow and put his stamp on the business.

Adding a nice twist increasing the angst, Simon Krepps (Simeon Lee) isn’t the founder. He was a fortune hunter who married the heiress, Elisabeth Krepps (no direct parallel to the novel) and took over. Elisabeth admits at the climax that she married in haste and repented ever since.

Simon, as you’d expect, runs the department store and his family with an iron hand. He threw out their daughter, Annabelle, for marrying an Italian communist. He pits their two sons, Albert (Alfred Lee) and David (David Lee) against each other. And when Annabelle’s long-lost daughter Francesa shows up, Simon falls under her spell. At last! A charming, flattering young woman who tells him how wonderful he is and, or so Simon claims, has done more work to promote the store in 15 days than Albert or David have done in 15 years.

There’s no fool like an old fool. Simon is so smitten by Francesa that he agrees to her scheme of using expensive diamonds for her jewelry line instead of costume jewelry. He shows her the fortune in uncut diamonds that she’ll oversee.

Meanwhile, Avril has disappeared but only Marlène worries. Bad scriptwriting makes Avril’s editor and coworkers at La Voix du Nord unconcerned when she goes missing for days. The editor fires her instead of calling the police or making the most basic effort to find out why his star reporter disappeared.

Or was she his star reporter? We see a flashback when the editor assigns Avril to do a feature story on Au Bon Temps and she complains because it’s not serious journalism. It’s not, Avril. You’re correct. But you’re still wrong because feature stories about the biggest advertiser in the area are what pay the bills, including your salary.

Subscriptions don’t keep newspapers in business. Ad revenue does.

Laurence cares about Avril’s disappearance because a wrecked car is found in a quarry with a dead man inside and a dead woman nearby. The woman’s pocket contains a note with Avril’s name and address. But where is Avril?

If you know Les Petits Meurtres, then you know the answer. Avril exists to be the show’s punching bag. She’s in the hospital again, suffering from head injuries that induced Hollywood amnesia. No memories of what happened or who she is. Nor does she have any identification — despite the fact she was found near an abandoned scooter which has a license plate! Sloppy, sloppy policework on the part of whoever found her, near death, and brought her to the hospital. This is how accident victims are identified, even in northern France in 1962.

But back to the criminally neglected plot. Simon is acting, in typical Christie fashion, as if he wants to be murdered. Not only does his family have good reason, so does an older woman, Mathilde Noël, who works in Cosmetics. Her son, Thierry, got a job at Au Bon Temps and stole from the till. He’s in jail and this is when the script addresses a major plot element of Hercule Poirot’s Christmas. The illegitimate son who was abandoned by his father is Thierry and his indifferent father is Laurence. He’d enjoyed a quickie wartime romance with Mathilde in 1942 and the vagaries of time separated them.

This made about as much sense as Avril not being identified when found. Laurence regularly makes the papers for solving crimes. Mathilde has worked for years at Au Bon Temps in Lille. Yet somehow, she never contacted Laurence to say, “I had your son?” It’s not really addressed in the plot, other than her saying, “You didn’t want children.” But what Laurence said to a wartime lover in 1942 might not be true 20 years later. He might not have been able to find her, or even know she survived. But Mathilde couldn’t have missed hearing about the famous commissaire Laurence, pride of the Lille police force.

The plot also dispenses with the complicated triangle involving Simon, wife Elisabeth, and Gaspard Carpentier who is NOT one of Simon’s illegitimate sons. This Simon had none, despite potential wartime romances. Carpentier is the browbeaten store manager, and Simon knows about the affair. But he doesn’t care? A man like Simon wouldn’t tolerate his wife stepping out on him no matter how many mistresses he enjoys. That’s the hypocrisy of powerful people.

This twist arrives from out of left field. There’s also very little explanation for how Carpentier, when he dropped off Mathilde, snuck back into her house and hid the diamonds in a bonsai arrangement. He’s that good a housebreaker? Big department store managers need to be flexible to deal with the buying public, but I found that hard to buy.

Similarly, I’d have liked to learned more about Francesca (Pilar Estravados); what she wanted, how desperate she was. And the cognac salesman who’s car is discovered in the quarry with his dead body? Nothing. His sole purpose for existing is to get the plot going, yet the script could have done something with him too, turning him into a bigger red herring.

Instead, you get Marlène, Avril, and Laurence behaving worse than usual.