Teresa Reviews The Dark Room (2021)

Teresa reviews The Dark Room (2021), an original story from Les Petits Muertres, and discerned the shadow of Agatha in these fashion crimes.

(Le Chambre Noire)

(c)2024 by Teresa Peschel

Fidelity to text: Zero stranglers

This is original material, but it’s best to say it’s Agatha-adjacent.

Quality of movie: 4 stranglers

The Les Petits Muertres crew told a coherent story, devised a plausible mystery, showed character development, and it was sometimes funny.

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

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

We have a winner, not always a certainty with Les Petits Muertres. Interestingly, this episode is original writing. It is not based on anything Agatha wrote. The idea with Season Three was to go in new directions. This was partly due to rights issues and partly due to the production company believing the remaining available properties were not suitable for adapting. You have to wonder how they would have rewritten Murder on the Orient Express or Passenger to Frankfurt. Fortunately, we’ll be spared that fate.

This leads directly to the next question. Does La Chambre Noire feel like an Agatha story? Something the Queen of Crime could have written? Always keep in mind she wrote plenty. Sixty-six novels alone, plus uncounted short stories. There are so many short stories, they’ve never been collected in one place. Within her short stories, she experimented with setting and character, played with the paranormal, and explored new ways of looking at a situation. Many of her short stories do not shriek “Agatha Christe wrote me!!!!! Bwa-ha-ha-ha!” Although she’s not considered a humor writer like P. G. Wodehouse, she could be funny in a sly, dry way.

So is this a Christie story? For this episode, yes. The mystery is plausible. It involves several Agatha hallmarks: anyone can be guilty, anyone can be murdered, and just because someone’s not the murderer doesn’t mean he’s an innocent lamb. Once you know the answer, you can see how the plot threads you ignored or didn’t understand fit together into a coherent whole. This episode also invokes two classic mystery tropes: old sins cast long shadows and revenge is a dish best served very cold.

Commissaire Gréco is settling into Lille. Despite solving her first, high-profile case successfully, she still doesn’t get any respect from her supervisor, Commissaire Legoff, or from the rest of the staff. But she perseveres.

Detective Beretta recognizes her as his smart boss, and he’s becoming loyal. Rose Bellecour is their shadow, inserting her psychoanalysis of suspects as needed. Coroner Blum has a severe crush on Gréco, one she is unaware of but other people are noticing.

Unlike her predecessors in Lille, Annie Gréco isn’t a toxic boss like Swan Laurence or Jean Larosière (yet). She wants to prove herself but she doesn’t feel the need to be obnoxious to her staff. It’s so refreshing to not watch the boss snipe at everyone around him. It’s also refreshing to watch Beretta — who could have been treated as a buffoon — prove that while he has a hair-trigger temper, he’s not stupid. Nor is Rose an incompetent doll with no Nancy Drew skills. She’s capable of observing and drawing logical conclusions. We’ll see how long this happy situation lasts.

Our story opens at a fashion magazine’s office. It’s not Vogue which would be headquartered in Paris, not some provincial backwater like Lille. But Lille is the largest city in a large, ignored, underserved region of France so it makes sense they could have — in the ’70s — a regional fashion magazine to serve regional advertisers like local department stores and garment manufacturers. Very few citizens could afford to travel to Paris four times a year to purchase haute couture. With a strong local economy, a large area could support local magazines, showing the locals how to dress well, cook current fashionable foods, and educate their minds about the current fashionable books and movies. Think of Femme as a triple-A farm team for Vogue. Writers, photographers, editors, and models would start here and if they had that something extra and the drive to succeed at all costs, they’d move on to Paris. If they didn’t, they’d spend their career in Lille as big fish in a small pond.

Or, if they couldn’t make it in the big city, they’d end up at Femme magazine in Lille and endlessly bore everyone around them talking about how they could’ve been a contender if only they’d gotten that lucky break. Which is how you get a photographer like John Berger. As you eventually learn, he’s worse than the typical fashion photographer. He doesn’t just harass his models and treat them like dirt. He rapes the girls and when they get pregnant forces them to have abortions.

Why is he tolerated in Lille? Because he’s a good photographer. At the climax, Gréco tells the murderer that magazine editor Eve Laverne (obviously modeled on Anna Wintour) didn’t know what happened to his daughter. Eve Laverne knew. It would be impossible for her not to know Berger was a rapist; hearing the screams from the studio, watching how the girls avoided him whenever they could, overhearing office gossip, and seeing the girls come and go. She didn’t know because she didn’t want to know. Eve Laverne needed a topnotch photographer for the magazine and so, as is typical everywhere, the underlings suffered so she could get the magazine she wanted. After all, if those models wanted to hit the big time, they might as well learn early their true status: interchangeable bodies with plenty more crowding the lobby desperate for a lucky break.

And so, a model is found dramatically strangled, with paper cutouts of eyes and a mouth covering her eyes and mouth. Soon, another model is found in a similar fashion.

Commissaire Legoff, under pressure from higher ups and not trusting Gréco, accepts a superstar cop from Paris, Pierre-Victor Kozak. He’s so renowned, he’s nicknamed PVK. His shirt lacks top buttons (typical for the ’70s), he’s pushy, ambitious, and smart enough to steal someone else’s ideas. Parachuting into Lille to solve a high-profile case involving hot models and famous photographers is just what he likes. He is also susceptible to fame and blandishments, so if his new best friend, the famous photographer, offers him access to other celebrities? Then his new best friend can’t be guilty.

Gréco is deeply insulted when her case is handed over to PVK, and she’s expected to work as his underling. She stomps off and prepares to leave Lille. A drunken night at the hotel leads to meeting a possible soulmate who gives her a reason to make a new life far away.

But Gréco’s sudden departure throws Beretta into a tailspin. He’s come to rely on her and resents being told what to do by PVK. Rose isn’t impressed either. The two persuade Gréco to work the case privately from her hotel room. They get her evidence and files so she can continue to investigate. Gréco won’t get sidetracked by promises of celebrity access like PVK does.

The second, secret investigation is discovered but Gréco takes the blame. A suspect who’s not innocent but he’s not a murderer is arrested. Then, Gréco’s favored suspect is discovered dead. He put on a dress and hung himself, surrounded by an array of photographs. If the fashion photographer is dead, along with the magazine editor, two models, and a nurse, while the main suspect is in jail, then who could the murderer be?

Gréco works it out, proving that in Christie world, the nicest people can be murderers. She also proves that showboating supercops from Paris may have gotten lucky breaks but they still aren’t contenders.

She is, along with Beretta and Rose.