Teresa Reviews La Plume Empoisonnee (2009)

Teresa reviews La Plume Empoisonnee (2009), the French TV version of “The Poisoned Feather” from “The Little Murders of Agatha Christie” and thought it packed 10 pounds of baguettes in a 5 pound bag.

Source: Amazon Prime “The Little Murders of Agatha Christie”
(La Plume Empoisonnee)

(c)2023 by Teresa Peschel

Fidelity to text: 2 poisoned teacups

Miss Marple’s gone, lots of added murders, radical character rewrites, and more plot than you can shake a stick at

Quality of film: 2 poisoned teacups

Comedy amid tragedy and enough plot for three mysteries but not well-interwoven.

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

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

The scriptwriter had delusions of grandeur in this film and the director did nothing to rein them in. Why stick with the perfectly good, reasonably convoluted plot in The Moving Finger, excise Miss Marple, and turn it into a routine police procedural? How boring.

Why not add a murder committed because of religious fanaticism, the entire village in on the coverup, the resultant soul corruption of said village, and make the poison pen writer someone else? And, to reference the novel, make Agatha’s original villain, Richard Symmington, have a crazy wife whom he murders as a crime of opportunism, piggybacking on someone else’s poison pen letters and death by poisoned tea.

As usual, I’ll stick with Agatha’s names wherever possible, despite how the film takes bizarre liberties.

Since this is a police procedural, insert Lampion as a convalescent trying to recover from being heroically shot in the line of duty (an entire film’s worth of plot by itself).

Have Larosière find him the least hospitable guesthouse in northern France, agonize over how he nearly lost the closest thing to a son he’ll ever have, and make Larosière the instrument of Megan Hunter’s makeover. But in a fatherly way, because he’s at least 30 years too old for her. Lampion can’t because girls aren’t his cup of tea and he has yet to receive the gay best friend memo.

Since that’s not exciting enough, add some very unpleasant sex scenes where you wonder why the women are putting up with those men. I know the village is isolated, but they could do better. Oh, and the implied lesbian relationship between Miss Emily Barton, elderly impoverished spinster and champion of decency, and her rawboned, rangy, redheaded, thirty-years-younger maid.

Not enough plot?

A hidden identity always enhances a mystery! The man related to the drowned woman of five years ago has been hiding in plain sight, fomenting discontent and searching for clues. Since he’s as crazy as this film’s Mona Symmington, he’s not content with ferreting out the truth. No, he writes the poison pen letters, and as a resident of the village, he’s got a fairly good idea of where to stick the knife in. His letters often hit home. But unlike Mona Symmington, he hides his madness except when he poisons a random person at tea and bashes in the head of a snoopy housemaid.

Is the Rev. Dane Calthrop still there? No, he’s become a much younger, handsome Catholic priest. Unmarried, naturally, so the role of Mrs. Dane Calthrop has been taken by Père Hector’s mother, Mathilde. She’s ashamed of her hidden past and is determined that her dear son become a priest and not be seduced by lovely, artistically inclined floozies into a different life.

Is Doctor Griffith there? Yep, but he’s an alcoholic who killed a woman through drunken malpractice. He’s on the wagon — temporarily — but falls off again because Lampion and Larosière start asking questions about why anyone would poison Miss Barton with cyanide-laced tea in a roomful of witnesses.

How about Dr. Griffith’s sister, Aimée? She’s not the Girl Guide leader she used to be. She pretends to be a stalwart citizen, minding the morals of the villagers along with the priest’s mother and Miss Barton, but that doesn’t stop her from keeping lewd and unpleasant assignations with the village junkman. While being watched by the junkman’s uncomfortable dog.

By this time, you’d think you’d wandered into David Lynch territory. The point must be that since the villagers (all of them? There must have been more people in the village than this small group) helped Mathilde cover up Clara’s murder, they were possessed by demons and their souls corrupted. Not much of Agatha’s original characterizations carried over. She certainly didn’t discuss her characters’ unhappy, angry, furtive sex lives.

Richard Symmington’s still a lawyer. His wife Mona is completely nuts.

But Richard isn’t hubby #2 for Mona, with Megan being Mona’s daughter from her first marriage acting as a constant reminder of her disreputable father. No, Megan’s the reason why Richard and Mona were forced into that shotgun wedding and both parents have resented her ever since. This is despite the presence of Megan’s two younger brothers who must have arrived via immaculate conception considering how obviously Richard and Mona dislike each other.

Richard and Mona despise Megan even more than they dislike each other. Megan is Hollywood plain, meaning she’s already far prettier than anyone you know in real life and after her makeover in Lille, paid for by Larosière, she’s a knockout.

Miraculously, she’s not required to take off her clothes. Even more miraculously, her abusive upbringing left her able to respond to kind overtures. Hopefully, she’s kinder to her two younger brothers than her parents are to her.

The governess, Elsie, remains much as she was in the novel. She’s probably very grateful for not being rewritten into a slutty slattern. She’s still gorgeous and capable and Richard still wants her. But he doesn’t plot his wife’s murder. No, when the poison pen letters flood the village, he’s as shocked as anyone. But when Miss Barton drinks the fatal cup of tea, followed by Agnes’ disappearance, he seizes his chance and shoves his unwanted wife out of the church belfry window. She plummets to her death in front of Lampion who, when he stops being super-squicked out which he should have gotten over by now considering he’s been a police inspector for some time, realizes she was pushed.

Actual police work is shown on the screen. Larosière returns to headquarters to study the case files on Clara’s death. But even so, much of the solution is pulled out of the ether. How could Lampion decide that Kochenko (meant to be Mr. Pye) was in disguise? His gaydar was that good? Because Kochenko had a minimalist bedroom with only two pieces of art? When he was flamboyant everywhere else?

It wasn’t his police instincts. He panicked when a screen fell over while he was searching Clara’s abandoned house and raced outside, opening up his wound. And then the murderer arrived on the scene and … didn’t kill another annoyance who was getting in his way? That didn’t make any sense, particularly since our murderer already demonstrated his lack of scruples.

I also don’t know how Lampion didn’t die from exposure as he bled out on the cold ground, on such a blustery day. Or after the junkman’s dog found him and he was hauled back to the village in the back of the junkman’s cart, fully exposed to the weather.

This isn’t The Moving Finger you remember. This isn’t any Agatha novel you remember. If you watch, you won’t be able to forget it, but that isn’t always the best outcome. Less plot would have made this a better film.