Teresa Reviews Le Flux et le Reflux (2011)
Teresa reviews Le Flux et le Reflux (2011), the French version of Taken at the Flood
(c)2023 by Teresa Peschel
Fidelity to text: 3½ poison bottles
Surprisingly close to the text, despite the transplant in time and space and the disappearance of Poirot and two of the Cloades.
Quality of film: 4½ poison bottles
The story held together and it made a good case for why Lynn Marchmont would fall for David Hunter.
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I don’t expect perfect fidelity to text with season one of Les Petits Meurtres d’Agatha Christie the way I could with David Suchet’s Poirot. They’re French. They rewrite Agatha’s books into police procedurals, transform the acting detective (whoever it was) into Larosière and Lampion, change date and location, and wrestle with all the usual issues of morphing books into movies.
But I do expect an English production company that usually does a fine job adapting a classic English novel addressing a very specific era in English history (the immediate post-WWII period) to produce a fine film. Or at least a plausible one. But no. Poirot’s version of Taken at the Flood failed on many levels.
Meanwhile Les Petits Meurtres — despite all its changes — managed to make a plausible, coherent movie that followed the novel logically and faithfully. So it can be done, and sometimes, it takes a foreign film company to prove it.
Since this series takes place in northern France in and around 1935, how did they manage the transformation from England’s post-WWII social milieu? They started by making Gordon Cloade into Larosière’s WWI commanding officer. They had a father/son relationship in the trenches. Gordon Cloade made Larosière into the man he is today.
So when they reconnect at a fancy dinner, Larosière is overjoyed. He drags Lampion along to the club, where he’s wildly out of place.
But at the club, while Larosière is having a grand reunion, Lampion gets cornered by the club bore, Major Porter. He escapes thanks to falling ill from a big cigar, but the major tracks him to the police station the next day, where he has much to say about Gordon Cloade.
A few days later, Larosière and Lampion are invited to Gordon’s château for a gala dinner. That’s when Gordon drops the bombshell on them and his relatives, who are all financially dependent on him. He’s remarried at last, and very suddenly too, to a much younger woman. He reassures his brother Jeremy (married to Frances), sister Adela/Katherine (the two characters were combined), niece Lynn (Adela’s daughter), and nephew Rowley (son of a deceased brother) that they can still live in the château, he’ll still provide for them financially, and he’ll make sure they’re provided for as promised in his will.
Where is his new wife, Rosaleen? Why in Paris, shopping up a storm with her brother, David Hunter, to keep an eye on her. Gordon promises his shocked and horrified relatives they’ll meet very soon.
He heads to his Paris townhouse to reunite with his new bride (and probably work on fathering an heir). But before anyone can meet her, the townhouse burns to the ground, leaving only two people alive: Rosaleen and her brother David.
The Cloade family is devastated and not just because Gordon’s dead. He had not rewritten his will. His marriage invalidated his previous will so his widowed bride inherited everything down to the last knickknack. Rosaleen shows up, looking like a gold-digger but not acting like one. Her brother David is more willing to toss the family out on their ears.
As for Larosière, he is not just devastated. He’s emotionally destroyed. The man he considered his father-figure is dead. He’s sure it was murder because the man he knew would never fall asleep in his chair, smoking a pipe, and burn down his townhouse and everyone in it. Yet that’s what the fire marshal insists happened. He very carefully checked for arson because Gordon is a wealthy, important man and he’s under pressure to get it right.
Could it have been a tragic accident?
Larosière can’t accept this conclusion and spirals down into a deep depression, made worse by heavy drinking. Lampion rises to the occasion and, in between setting up his new, modern do-it-yourself forensic lab, shields Larosière from the consequences of his collapse and begins investigating. Lampion can’t prove murder either. He does his darnedest to take care of his own father-figure, frustrating though Larosière can be.
Meanwhile, the Cloade family get to know Rosaleen and David. She’s very strange. She doesn’t seem broken up about Gordon. She loves being rich. Yet she’s comfortable in the kitchen peeling potatoes. It’s very clear she’s under David’s thumb. He resents handing out money to the Cloade family.
You can see his point of view: why should these parasites continue sponging off his sister?
Yet every scene we saw with Gordon and his family demonstrated that even though Gordon was a considerate man, he liked keeping his family helpless and under his roof. He wanted them to be dependent and he got what he wanted. Even Lynn, girl archeologist back from Egypt, didn’t pay for her excavations. Gordon did. Rowley’s farm doesn’t pay its way. Adela is a loony spiritualist who’s completely incapable of making a living with her Tarot cards and crystal ball. Jeremy is a failed investor and has lost his clients’ money. Frances is used to the life as the lady of the manor. They need Gordon, and he likes it like that.
But now they must deal with David.
The Poirot version got David so very wrong and this version got David right. He’s far more of a man than Rowley. He’s decisive, virile, handsome, and forceful. Since events happen so quickly, Lynn hasn’t had time to receive endless letters from home telling her how awful David is, keeping the purse-strings pulled tight. Instead, she meets David at the same time as everyone else: when he’s actively protecting his sister’s interests instead of waiting around for someone else to do the job.
David is instantly attracted to her and, unlike Rowley, he shows it. Lynn knows she and Rowley are to marry and she’ll become a farmer’s wife but that life looks less and less attractive, particularly since Rowley is so passive. So nebbishy. So uninterested in her.
David wants her. With Rowley, it’s hard to tell.
The stranger turns up dead, his head bashed in. Major Porter, the club bore that Lampion remembers meeting, insists that this man is Rosaleen’s first husband. She insists she’s never seen him before. David is arrested for murder. But when Major Porter learns that his court testimony will send David to the guillotine, he shoots himself.
Two deaths make Lampion reconsider Larosière’s insistence that Gordon’s death was murder. He’s able to coax Larosière from out of the bottle and back onto the police force just in time for Rosaleen to die in her sleep. Healthy young women don’t die in their sleep, not unless they’re helped along. It turns out someone slipped morphine pills into Rosaleen’s harmless sleeping bromides. The old Larosière comes roaring back and between the two of them, they work out what happened.
Gordon’s death was a tragic accident just as the fire marshal insisted, but his new bride Rosaleen died in the fire. David urged a housemaid to take her place so they could live in clover. Enoch Arden’s death was an accident that Rowley took advantage of and he was Frances’ cousin pretending to be Rosaleen’s first husband to get rid of her and David. Major Porter’s death was suicide, because he couldn’t perjure himself. The true murder was that of Rosaleen, at David’s hand, because he couldn’t count on her silent acquiescence anymore.
It’s all there, from the learned helplessness of the Cloade family to Adela’s loony spiritualism to Gordon’s death being a tragic accident.
This is the film of Taken at the Flood to watch. Poirot’s not there, but he’d approve of how the case was handled.
