Teresa Reviews Murderous Melodies (2018)

Teresa reviews Murderous Melodies (2018), an adaptation of The Sittaford Mystery from the French Little Murders of Agatha Christie, and feels unexpectedly hopeful about the rest of the series.

(Mélodie Mortelle)

Source: MHz subscription channel at Amazon Prime.

(c)2023 by Teresa Peschel

Fidelity to text: 1½ syringes

A séance starts the action. The murderer claims one method of traveling, while using another. That’s all the fat lady sings.

Quality of movie: 2 syringes

This could have been really good if it had spent any time on the recording studio and the musicians. Instead, you get Laurence hallucinating about his lost love.

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

Also, follow Teresa’s discussion of these movie on her podcast.One missed opportunity after another is what you’ll say after watching this mess of an adaptation of The Sittaford Mystery. And, once again, there’s very little continuity with previous episodes in Season Two as if the writers and directors never saw the previous episodes.

Still, as incoherent, poorly thought out, and plot elements flinging themselves in from left field as this was, it’s still better than ITV’s Marple version from 2006. I can’t believe I wrote that sentence, yet here we are.

Agatha often used the supernatural in her stories, and in different ways depending on the genre, and in different ways depending on the genre. If they were mysteries, the paranormal was nearly always a blind to conceal the true, completely human criminal. If you see characters conducting a séance, be suspicious. As a well-read and careful observer, she knew that most spiritualists were frauds. It’s amazing what stunts you can pull off when you’re skilled at sleight of hand and the audience is desperate to believe.

So, we start with the séance in the recording studio. Nicky, a budding pop star with a manufactured happy past to conceal her sad origins, has had a fight with her guitarist-fiancé, Mike. Pianist Jeff, songwriter Tony, and Marlène fill out the circle. Marlène is head of Nicky’s fan club and she’s drafted because Nicky, a true believer, needed one more person to fill out the circle after Mike stormed out. In a building devoted to recording pop records with loads of people ambling in and out of view.

A few words about names: no one corresponds to the source material characters so don’t waste your time. The musicians are yē-yē singers. That’s a French interpretation of American and British pop rock of the early ’60s. They all got their French names anglicized, which is how you get names like “Jeff” or “Mike” in the north of France in 1962. Later, when Avril infiltrates the studio and is groomed to be the next singing sensation, she becomes “Shirley.” The pronunciation is very French.

Back to the séance. Supposedly Nicky is a devotee and so is Marlène, yet during the séance, they both make the most basic of mistakes, ensuring they’re fooled. What is it? It’s that people around the circle ALL and I do mean ALL, including the medium, keep their hands flat on the table where they can be seen. The only exception is the person working the planchette on the Ouija board. That person keeps one hand, loosely, on the planchette to channel whatever spirit showed up. Both hands remain clearly visible. Keeping your hands where they can be seen means tricksters and frauds can’t rap on the table or move the planchette from beneath with magnets or perform any of the hundreds of other tricks that fakes use to con the gullible. They’ve got to work a little harder.

Later in the episode when Laurence realizes how they’d been fooled, based on what the ghost of Dr. Maillol told him, he does the same thing. Do Marlène or Avril notice? They do not.

An immense quantity of the episode is given over to Laurence’s maunderings about Dr. Maillol. She was the only woman he’s ever loved and she died in a plane crash on her way back to him, France, and the diamond engagement ring in his pocket. He sees her ghost everywhere. She leaves her scarf on a gravestone for him to find. She smokes with him, drinks with him, talks to him. It’s interesting to watch a hardcore materialist cope with a spirit that he can’t believe or accept but also can’t bear to let go. This is how frauds gain entrée. They find the mark’s pressure point and press. Hard.

Naturally, Laurence being a confirmed skeptic and the showrunners refusing to admit the existence of past episodes, he does not reach out to his mother, the loony spiritualist we met in Témoin Muet (2013). Avril, who’s experienced genuine contact with the astral plane in previous episodes, never senses a thing.

Because so much time is wasted here to give Laurence closure on his lost love, we don’t spend serious time with Nicky, her bandmates Jeff, Marlon, Ray, composer Tony, or murdered fiancé Mike.

We do meet Franck, the record company owner and impresario. If you think he’s stereotyped, you’re right! Except that record company owners really are that sleazy. They really do treat the talent like cattle they can cheat and abuse, enriching themselves. There are plenty more wannabe pop stars waiting in the wings, equally talented but more desperate, and thus more amenable to being used if only it means becoming a star and getting a recording contract. If you’re ever in the position of Nicky or Avril, read your contract with your own lawyer before signing.

Unfortunately, we do not get nearly enough time with Franck’s secretary, Chantal Lavigne. She hovers in the background, and, as his secretary, knows most of his secrets. She types his contracts, answers his phone, and does his filing. You see virtually nothing of Chantal interacting with the talent, so when she kidnaps Avril, because she took Nicky’s place as the flavor of the week, it comes completely out of left field. There’s no rationale behind her behavior at all, other than the scriptwriter needed something exciting. And then, after Avril’s rescued, nothing. She disappears back to wherever plain, unloved but vital clerical workers go when their moment in the spotlight is over.

Similarly, does Jeff and Marlon have some kind of drug business going on? That they did in cahoots with Franck? That they ran parallel to Franck’s drug ring? That they took over from Franck after he got garroted in his car? It was very unclear. Better subtitles might have helped. Spending less time on Laurence’s angst and more time on plot would have helped far more.

More time spent showing how the record studio people interacted would have meant less time with Laurence telling us what happened after he worked it out, thanks to ghostly messages from beyond. The three deaths (two murders and one accidental) all hinge on Tony’s relationship with Nicky. He’s her songwriter, back when pop stars weren’t expected to be more than good singers. Yet you barely see him and Nicky together.

You don’t get flashbacks to Nicky’s traumatic past. Tony relates his traumatic past, but again, you don’t see him grieving his dead wife and dumping their three-year-old daughter off at the orphanage. Instead, you get a bloodless retelling to Laurence in his office because Laurence got to wallow in the past. Nor do you get a single scene of Nicky’s trauma after she was abandoned.

That record studio seethed with self-loathing, destructive impulses, greed, money, and the fame monster but you won’t see them. You’ll get Laurence mooning over Dr. Maillol and then — at last! — understanding that she’s dead and it’s time to move on. Oh, and you’ll get Avril channeling her inner pop star, like she channeled her inner chanteuse in Le Crime ne paie pas (2014) which she completely forgot about because the past on Les Petits Muertres is dead and gone unless it’s needed to make a point.