Teresa Reviews The Hollow (2021)

Teresa reviews The Hollow (2021), a French version of “The Hollow” in which the plot is jettisoned in favor of comic and tragic love stories.

(Le Vallon)

(c)2024 by Teresa Peschel

Fidelity to text: 1½ guns

The murderer remains the same, the main victim is still a cheating egoist, but everything else in the novel was jettisoned.

Quality of movie: 3 guns

Surprisingly coherent considering how many subplots were tangled up.

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

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

The Hollow (1946) is the last Agatha story Les Petits Muertres adapted. After this, it’s all original material. This isn’t unexpected considering how fast and loose the production company played with her source material in previous episodes. They regularly boiled down a complex novel into a one-sentence summary and produced a story unrelated to what they started with. Sometimes this works. Frequently, it doesn’t.

This time it worked.

The production company’s stated reason is that rights were becoming increasingly difficult to acquire, the remaining novels would be too difficult to adapt, and anyway, they wanted to forge into a brave new world where they told Agatha-adjacent mysteries. They could also amp up the comedy. Agatha can be dryly amusing, but no one would ever confuse her with P.G. Wodehouse. Comic hijinks and tragic murders make for uneasy partners.

But having sat through some 40 installments of Les Petits Muertres spread over three very different seasons, I can definitively say the production company wanted more funny and less heartrending.

Thus we arrive at the last “real” Agatha, The Hollow, and it was a tragedy for much of the novel’s characters. Here? Well, you’ll never once contemplate what happens next to the Rivière boys, the staff at the Rivière clinic now that both doctors are dead, the marriage of Rose’s parents, the families of the patients Dr. Rivière murdered on the operating table because of his egoism, or even the family and friends of Dr. Colin who existed solely to be murdered early on to get the plot moving.

Instead, you’ll be amused by Dr. Blum’s sad sack pursuit of Gréco, Beretta’s over-the-top pursuit of his soon-to-be ex-wife, Beretta’s ludicrous male-bonding with his ex-wife’s new lover who’s a professional marijuana dealer, Rose concealing evidence to prevent her mother’s adultery being revealed so she’s not arrested for murder, and the catfight between two of Dr. Rivière’s many mistresses. Oh, and the psychiatric needs of the station commissaire.

Does any of that have anything to do with The Hollow? No, but you can now fully understand the desire of the production company to discard Agatha. Her plots were straitjackets.

Did any parts of The Hollow make it onscreen? Fabrice and Geneviève Rivière are John and Gerda Christow. Fabrice is the celebrated doctor running the clinic named after him. He’s a cheating egoist who believes his own press about his surgical prowess although here, he’s a celebrated plastic surgeon instead of an esteemed researcher developing a miraculous cure for a dread disease. Geneviève is his mousy, stay-at-home wife who adores him and believes everything he tells her. They have two sons. In Geneviève’s eyes, Fabrice can do no wrong. She must support his greatness in every way she can.

This leads directly to murder #1, which did not come from the novel but it fits Geneviève’s character (and quite possibly Gerda’s). She shoots Dr. Colin because he’s going to inform the medical board that Fabrice shouldn’t be operating any more. He’s got Parkinson’s disease. His hands shake uncontrollably, and he’s (accidentally) murdered several patients while operating. The survivors face reconstructive surgery to fix the damage he did.

Also from the novel is Fabrice’s womanizing ways. He’s such a stud that the concierge of his pied-à-terre is impressed; a different woman every night of the week. Fabrice tells Geneviève he’s working late at the clinic and the poor, besotted fool believes him.

But when Barbara Bellecour tells Geneviève that her husband is cheating on her with Véronique (Barbara ignores her own adulterous affair with Fabrice), Geneviève is devastated. Everything she’d ever believed about Fabrice is proven to be a lie. She shoots him down like the lying, cheating dog he is.

But, like Gerda from the novel, she plans. Like Gerda, she uses two guns; the real one and the dummy. Unlike Gerda, she doesn’t have a huge, supportive family ready to cover her tracks, conceal evidence, and make sure she gets away with murder. She covers her tracks herself. She also tries to “accidentally” poison herself when she’s found out by Rose and is prevented from poisoning her. Geneviève lives to stand trial for the murders of her husband and Dr. Colin.

The Angkatells, their entailed property woes, their poor relations, their devoted servants, Henrietta Savernake, and visiting Hollywood movie stars are gone.

In their place is Beretta anguishing over Delphine, his soon-to-be ex-wife. She’s had it with his anger-management issues. She’s already moved on and is keeping company with a seedy boutique pot dealer, Paulo Romero. How can Beretta’s love life be tied into Dr. Rivière’s troubles?

Via his Parkinson’s disease, of course. It seems the good doctor self-medicates with high-grade Columbian marijuana. Gréco learns this when they find weed while searching the doctor’s office. Since her concierge at her residential hotel is an aficionado of weed, he correctly identifies the doctor’s drug dealer with the skill of a wine fancier.

When Beretta learns Dr. Rivière’s drug dealer is his ex-wife’s new squeeze, he kidnaps Paulo to get him away from Delphine.

He holds Paulo hostage in his apartment and then, in a turn that Wodehouse might appreciate, he takes romance lessons from Paulo to win Delphine back. For someone supposedly in love with Delphine, Paulo is remarkably cooperative. His freedom (and freedom from prosecution for drug crimes) is far more important than some cop’s ex. For Paulo Romero, girls come easy. For Max Beretta, there’s only Delphine.

Meanwhile, Dr. Blum falls more in love with Gréco, but like Beretta, he’s also doomed to fail. Gréco can’t see him, she doesn’t want to see him, and states that loving a man means no career.

In a way, Barbara Bellecour says something similar since her husband (Rose’s father) is off being a cosmetics king while she sits at home, aimless and bored. We don’t know how Véronique feels, although she’s obviously the arty type as well as being Barbara’s best friend right up until they discover they’re each one of Dr. Rivière’s interchangeable mistresses.

And so we circle back to Geneviève Rivière and the central motif of The Hollow that did make it into the script. It’s how pathological and traumatic love in its many forms can be. Geneviève adores Fabrice Rivière to the point of obsession and when her eyes are opened to his true nature, she kills him. Dr. Rivière in turn needs his ego constantly stroked, by women and by professional acclaim, and when Parkinson’s causes him to kill patients on the operating table, does he stop operating? He does not, because he’s obsessed with being the best there is. Beretta is obsessed with Delphine who only has eyes for a seedy drug dealer. The drug dealer is okay with discarding Delphine if it wins him his freedom. Dr. Blum adores from afar and is embarrassed for his pains. Rose tries to save her mother and is humiliated again because her mother never loved her and never will.

Love doesn’t make the world go round smoothly for anyone here, but at least you’ll enjoy the ride.