Teresa Reviews Mortel Karma (2023)

Teresa reviews Mortel Karma (2023) from the third season of Agatha Christie’s Criminal Games, and wished for less plot and more depth.

a.k.a. Deadly Karma; original story

(c)2024 by Teresa Peschel

Agatha adjacent? 2½ statuettes

You’ll recognize how one person receives a message while everyone else hears something different. Plus, blackmailers always get murdered.

Quality of movie: 2½ statuettes

It’s underwritten, particularly considering how much plot was standing around waiting to be noticed, like overdressed mannequins in a luxury department store.

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

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

If you know your Agatha, you’ll recognize a trope she used in Death on the Nile (1937) and then greatly expanded upon in Appointment with Death (1938). It’s where a character says something like “If only I had been there to see madam being murdered …” or “Your past is never forgotten. Someone always remembers you…” Those are not what you’d call specific statements. They’re comments, almost said in passing, as far as most of the listeners are concerned.

But one listener, the one the speaker aims the remark to, understands the subtext. It says “I know who you are. I know what you did.” In Death on the Nile, add “pay me and I won’t reveal you’re the murderer.” In Appointment with Death, add “I know you’re a criminal hiding your disreputable past from your constituents and I can ruin you.”

Here, in Mortel Karma, combine both subtexts into a bigger message. It is “I know what you did. I know who you really are because I remember sharing a cell with you. Pay up or I’ll tell all to the police and your devoted acolytes.”

The other classic trope Agatha used was blackmailers always come to a bad end. They’re not nearly as smart as they’d like to think. They taunt the murderer and are swiftly murdered in turn, as demonstrated in this episode. But because the murderer isn’t that smart either (despite being smart enough to fool a bunch of hippies which, come to think of it, isn’t hard), he overlooks a crucial fact about his victim. Charles, the butler, really was trying to change his ways. But then why did Charles attempt blackmail despite transforming himself into a new, responsible citizen who’d overcome his past? Did he need the money to provide for his estranged daughter’s new baby?

Despite this episode being rich with child abandonment, you won’t find out. Charles’ life of crime caused his estrangement from his daughter. Gréco, pregnant at 15, gave up her daughter for adoption because she couldn’t take care of her. Her own mother died during the war and we’ll assume that her grandmother, who raised her, might have died too. And the father? Who knows? That storyline might become fodder for a future episode.

You’re now asking Gréco’s daughter? Yes, indeedy. And, unusually for Les Petits (it must be new showrunners), Gréco’s daughter has been foreshadowed in previous episodes! She carries a picture of her newborn, her sole keepsake of what might have been.

In this episode, Gréco learns what happened. She doesn’t expect this outcome when a superrich industrialist, purveyor of luxury goods to the elites, is found dead. The French audience probably instantly thought of Bernard Jean Étienne Arnault, CEO of LVMH, one of the premier luxury goods companies in the world and headquartered in Paris.

This industrialist, Pierre Baldini, had his skull bashed in by a Buddha statuette. The Buddha statue ties in with Pierre’s new interest in abandoning the capitalist lifestyle for the spiritualism of India. This wasn’t uncommon in the ’70s. Gurus and Lamas were everywhere. Maybe it was the drugs. Maybe it was a craving for a connection to deeper meaning in life, over and above getting rich women to shell out thousands for another purse that cost as much as a used car.

We’re told, in a very underwritten part of the plot, that Pierre was devastated when his wife died. To cope, he tried to find himself in the mysticism of the East.

Charles the butler despises those dirty, freeloading hippies who moved in. He’s upset that Pierre, normally a very smart man, has fallen for their line of drugs and free love. Pierre’s daughter Jade is equally distraught.

So is Nadine Saubot, Pierre’s CEO of his luxury goods empire. He owns it. She works for him. In another very underwritten bit of plot, you learn she’s Pierre’s mistress, leading to the question of why he fell apart after his wife’s death when he had a replacement waiting in the wings.

When Gréco begins investigating, she swiftly learns that Jade, the prime suspect, was adopted. Moreover, she was born at the same hospital on the same day that she gave birth to her lost daughter. Could they be the same child? Yes, they could. Casting did a good job here because you can see the resemblance, along with good scripting giving Jade some of her mother’s sardonic attitude. Jade had good reasons to murder dad, but Gréco refuses to believe it and searches for reasons why she didn’t. Jade, a spoiled chihuahua-packing princess, doesn’t make it easier. Her dog is better mannered than she is.

In another underwritten bit of plotting, Jade sort of mourns her adoptive father. But her adoptive mother’s recent death? Not a word. You do get a single line of dialog about Jade being reared by an army of nannies instead of her adoptive parents. Maybe they needed a baby as an accessory, like you know, this year’s it handbag, so that’s why they adopted her. That’s sure how it felt, to me and to Jade.

Coroner Blum gets a chance to shine, pursuing Jade in the hopes of exciting Gréco’s jealousy. He fails. Bob, her hippy concierge at the Nirvana hotel, really gets a meaty role in this episode. He’s on the scene when the body is discovered, introduces Lama Bhouti (who he’s never met in person) to Gréco, and tries to explain why Pierre needed Buddhism in his life along with plenty of opium and free love. You’ll never take him seriously as a suspect, unlike the other two freeloading hippies, Benji and Nanou. At the climax, Benji and Bob demonstrate their essential uselessness when a crisis hits.

Woven into this plot is still more plot. Like one of Bob’s herbal teas, there’s too much going on. Rose accidentally runs into Beretta, leaving him with amnesia, which she tries to cover up. Beretta transforms into a very different man!

Commissaire Legoff ends up drinking Bob’s confiscated herbal tea, heavily laced with opium, and ends up tripping through the stationhouse and confusing everyone around him. When not experiencing Nirvana, he’s in a panic because up and coming minister Jacques Chirac (1932-2019) is coming to inspect the police station. Chirac really was Minister of the Interior at the time and with a nickname like Le Bulldozer you know why everyone’s in a tizzy.

The film’s often very funny. You’ll laugh like we did, and then wonder why the script keeps ignoring the murder plot. I wanted more of Pierre’s relationship with his CEO, more of Charles’ redemption arc, more of Jade’s spoiled rich princess coming to grips with reality, and a better explanation of how the cat burglar was so easily able to pretend he was a guru. Are hippies and wannabe Buddhists really that gullible?

Apparently so. So, apparently, is Minister Jacques Chirac who accepts what he’s told as gospel.