Teresa Reviews Mysterious Affair at Styles (2016)

Teresa reviews Mysterious Affair at Styles (2016) (a.k.a. La Mystérieuse Affaire de Styles) from the French TV series and found it coherent, tragic, and weird when it’s not creepy.

From Les Petits Meurtres d’Agatha Christie, Season Two

(c)2023 by Teresa Peschel

Fidelity to text: 1½ massages

A gullible, rich older woman is set up for murder by her lover and her friend, who is the lover’s secret partner. Plenty of added weirdness.

Quality of movie: 3½ massages

Much better than the norm for Les Petits; it’s reasonably coherent, tragic, and weird when it’s not creepy.

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

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

This is another episode of Les Petits where it doesn’t matter if you’re unfamiliar with the source material. Only the one-sentence summary made it on screen along with retaining the name “Styles” for the house. Everything else, including drinking the blood of children to stay forever young? That’s the screenwriter, not Agatha.

Told you it got weird.

This episode also comes with a kitty carnage warning. I’m indebted to the Cinema Cats website https://cinemacats.com/ for this term. It’s devoted exclusively to cat appearances in film and TV from “purr blurs” to starring roles. They’ve got thousands of listings. We do our part by letting them know about cat appearances in Agatha adaptations.

In this case, a handsome, sleek, gray cat appears as Emilie’s (Mrs. Inglethorpe) pet. He’s named Confucius and, proving Avril’s character as a good person and Emilie’s secret daughter, he and Avril like each other.

Confucius is a choosy cat. He dislikes Dorothée, proving that she’s a bad person. Confucius — I suppose you could say he proves his loyalty to his dead mistress — saves Avril from certain death by poison when he cutely laps up the cream from the cream pitcher on her breakfast tray. He dies so Avril lives.

I do not consider this a win. But Avril is one of our stars so even though the series abuses her constantly, even more so in this episode, she must live to suffer again.

But back to the plot. There’s plenty to go around.

Eve Constantin (Evie Howard) is partners with Emilie at a very fancy health spa named “Styles.” If you look at their “S” logo carefully, it becomes a swan’s neck and back. Eve’s concerned about her friend and business partner. Emilie must be twenty years older than Eve. She’s desperate to recapture her youth. She doesn’t just swig back seaweed shakes, pamper herself with expensive beauty treatments, and indulge in multiple massages at the talented hands of her much, much younger hot husband, Adrien (Alfred Inglethorpe). She drinks the blood — freshly squeezed! — from young children, a treatment administered by Styles’ creepy staff doctor, Professor Hoffmann.

I don’t know if the screenwriter chose his name to hint at E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776-1822). That Hoffmann was a romantic German poet and writer of the fantastic, diabolical, and weird. But it fits in with what we see of Professor Hoffmann.

But there’s more! Emilie is too old to have a baby and she — or so she tells Avril — wishes now that she hadn’t abandoned a baby girl to St. Teresa’s orphanage back in 1934. She wants a baby with Adrien. What can a rich, desperate, post-menopause woman do in 1958? Why, she can hire a young woman and have her hot young husband impregnate said young woman. This being 1958, Emilie can’t provide the egg; that’s Dorothée’s job and why she’s being paid. It’s also why Dorothée demands very soon thereafter (probably the minute she realized she was pregnant) that Emilie adopt her, ensuring her financial stability.

Yes, Emilie’s adopted daughter is bearing her new, other child, fathered by her hot young husband. I have no idea if turkey basters were involved because a man doesn’t need to be present as long as his sperm is. But maybe Adrien did the deed himself. You won’t learn this salacious detail although I bet Pr. Hoffmann knows.

Want more? Emilie lived a full life in so many ways. After she was dumped by her older married violinist lover, leading her to abandon her infant daughter, she reinvented herself and took up with Anaïs Nin (1903-1977)! They enjoyed a grand love affair. Emilie is proud of featuring prominently in Anaïs Nin’s diaries. That’s why she takes it for granted that when Avril and Marlène check into Styles (to secretly investigate Eve’s claims about Emilie’s life being in danger from her hot, young husband) they must be secret lesbians eager for a private getaway.

Avril and Marlène are nonplussed. But Avril’s got a potential murder investigation and Marlène’s got a spa loaded with exotic beauty treatments to test so they accept their fate.

Meanwhile, Martial, a hot young journalist with a checkered past, appears to do a story on Styles. He’s soon murdered, drowned in the seawater pool and who discovers his body? Why Marlène does. Laurence shows up shortly thereafter to put the investigation on a marginally more professional basis.

That professionalism of his is why he seduces one of the suspects, Diane. She’s the wife of an important minister. Her spa visit at Styles doesn’t just involve seaweed shakes and intimate massages at the talented hands of Adrien. She drugs Emilie so she can enjoy Adrien’s other intimate services.

Gradually secrets are revealed; shocking, weird, and tragic. I said that Les Petits enjoys torturing Avril? She learns to her shock that the woman who abandoned her as an infant was Emilie. At first, she can’t accept it. Then, gradually, she decides she wants to get to know Emilie better. After all, she’s her mother and Confucius the cat likes her. So what happens next? Emilie dies tragically in Avril’s arms right after they reconcile.

Since that’s not enough punishment, Avril is later trapped in the spa’s sauna in attempted murder, steaming her alive like a lobster. She’s not just getting close to discovering the murderer. If she’s Emilie’s long-lost natural daughter, she’s the heir to millions of francs.

All the threads tie together when Laurence invites all the survivors to his office for the Poirot reveal. It’s at that point you learn that he had been doing some policework in the background, investigating the suspects. Marlène provided the necessary clue by a close perusal of celebrity gossip magazines.

The expected murderer is Adrien, naturally. Women are always murdered by their husbands; the tricky part is covering it up. His co-murderer is Eve. This was at once tragic and not quite believable but that’s because I get hung up on bus schedules. It seems our Eve was once a dean at a boys’ reformatory school (Bois-Colombes, but I’m unsure if that was real). She seduced a fifteen-year-old student who turns out to be Adrien.

But we’re told that Eve was with Emilie at Styles for ten years or more! I must assume that the immense disruption of WWII allowed Eve to conceal her past from Emilie. Her seduction of Adrien had to have taken place prior to the war. They managed to stay together, somehow, during all the chaos of the war years, enough that he — with her help? — fleeced rich, old, gullible Viviane Dujardin.

It’s implied that there were other victims as well.

The tragedy is that when Laurence makes his accusations, you know immediately who the puppet master was. It was Eve. Adrien defends her. He insists he was the killer. He looks to her like a hopeful puppy asking “did I do it right?”

She wanted to be rich so she pimped her lover out. And because it pleased her, Adrien did whatever she wanted. You know watching this scene that she’ll toss him to the curb to save herself while he, poor fool, will go to the guillotine trying to save her.

You’ll feel sorry for Adrien, but not for Eve. She was the one who poisoned Confucius, trying to poison Avril.