Teresa Reviews “They Do It With Mirrors” (2013)

Teresa reviews “They Do It With Mirrors” (2013), a.k.a. “Jeux de Glaces” (“Game of Mirrors”) from “Les Petits Meurtres d’Agatha Christie,” and thought it was merde.

Fidelity to text: 2 knives

Considerably simplified, Miss Marple vanishes, it’s a police procedural, and Carrie Louise gets a major personality transplant.

Quality of film on its own: 2½ knives

An annoying soundtrack, women as stereotypes, and missed opportunities galore.

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

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

As always, I’ll stick with the novel’s names wherever I can. It’s easier.

I must admit that this, the first episode of the second season, demonstrates truth in advertising. We watched one other episode of this season (L’Heure Zéro or Towards Zero) prior to this one. That film was #25 of 27 episodes. Everything I disliked in that film was on full display here, in the opening episode of the second season. If I’d watched the adaptations in order, I’d have been warned.

We start with ridiculous, comic animation showing how fun it is to knife or garrote people and how our detectives (Commissaire Swan Laurence, his secretary Marlène, and Alice Avril, girl reporter) attempt to solve the murders in a suitably madcap fashion because hey! Murder’s a game and it should be treated as something fun!

Then suddenly, film appears, focusing on a down-market Brigitte Bardot (her roots needed retouching very badly) wearing painted-on clothing. She’s shimmying to rock music (so hip and now!) while her hubby’s working underneath a car and the inmates of her parents’ criminal rehabilitation center ogle her and argue about ogling her. One of them gets his throat slashed, nearly taking his head off and spraying blood everywhere. Murder is always fun and madcap.

The police are called. The superintendent reassures Carrie Louise and Lewis Serrocold that nosy reporters won’t poke into their business and the murder, obviously done by one of the brain-damaged inmates, will be hushed up. It’s good to be powerful; you get the justice you demand.

But wait! Commissaire Laurence arrives at the scene of the crime in the nick of time, announces he’s the new sheriff in this shithole town (although the superintendent outranks him), and that the murderer is not this brain-damaged convict but that lefthanded one over there! He could tell by the knife slash across the throat — severing the carotid artery and the jugular vein — that the murderer couldn’t be righthanded. He’s arrogant, he’s the smartest person around for miles, he doesn’t want to be there, and he’s already making his boss look like a fool.

Our Brigitte Bardot knockoff is instantly smitten, ignoring her boring American husband. Carrie Louise and Lewis are horrified. The publicity! People won’t understand that these poor, violent souls need love and care, not being locked away.

See how fun murder is? This murder, by the way, has nothing to do with the novel (typical of season two scripts) and is never referred to again (typical of season two’s attention to detail).

Meanwhile, we meet our redhaired Nancy Drew wannabe and girl reporter. She’s Alice Avril and is currently writing the agony column in the local paper. She hates her job. She wants better things, yet throughout this episode (and in the other one I saw), she’s incompetent. She doesn’t see the clues in front of her, she ignores or conceals evidence, her relationship with Laurence quickly devolves into something out of junior high school where it’s tit for tat. She’s a morass of hurt feelings and doesn’t grasp that murder is serious enough that emotions should be kept in check.

Laurence is a first-class jerk. No question. But he’s far more serious about solving the crime. Alice is looking to score points and her ineptness is played for laughs. She can’t remember her cover story about why Carrie Louise should hire her as a maid. When faced with death — she’s a reporter! — she collapses and then as soon as the body’s out of sight, murder turns back into a fun game.

Then we meet Marlène, the blonde Marilyn Monroe-lookalike secretary. It doesn’t take long to learn that Marlène’s competence exists solely in looking good. She’s barely capable of running an office and, later on in L’Heure Zéro, she has no qualms about altering evidence to get the outcome she wants. She works for the police and should know how to handle evidence. But it’s played for laughs and hey, everyone agrees that no one needs to be serious about how citizens are accused or evidence is handled as long as it all turns out right in the end.

This season is set in the tail end of the 1950s and forges into the ’60s. It goes to great pains to tell us that women want more than kitchen, church, and children. Yet they make no effort to show that the two female leads are competent or smart. Alice could be a clone of Lucy Ricardo in 1955, failing at one job after another. Marlène is right out of some ’50s Mamie Van Doren or Jayne Mansfield flick, playing the dumb sex kitten. Except unlike them, she doesn’t hide her intellect. She doesn’t have one.

The other women get treated no better. Gina (our low-rent Brigitte Bardot) is a dumb slut. She openly cheats on her husband (or appears to do so), putting on a show for the violent inmates, trying to seduce Laurence, and carrying on with her cousin, Alex Restarick.

Mildred, her sister, is everything a woman shouldn’t be in France and gets even less respect than Gina does. She’s plain, dowdy, prim, stuck-up, dumb, and bad at investing. We’re told that the other characters laugh at her behind her back because she’s got nothing to offer. She’s nothing like this in the novel, other than plain compared to Gina. Everyone’s plain compared to Gina.

Carrie Louise gets a complete personality makeover, revealed in the climax. She’s not the innocent naïf everyone believes she is. She fully backs hubby Lewis’s plans to buy a tropical island and turn it into a utopia for their convicts. Those convicts will be fully redeemed as human beings once they’re away from the evils of civilization. Well, maybe. When Lewis’s embezzlement is revealed, the greater good is at stake. Carrie Louise is the mastermind behind Gulbrandsen’s and Edgar’s murder.

Edgar, by the way, is no longer Lewis’s secret son. He’s just another mental case to be used to build that shining city on the hill and then discarded when he’s no longer of use.

Everything you won’t like about season two is on display. Laurence is an arrogant jerk. Alice is annoying and incapable. Marlène isn’t any better. The local police are the Keystone Kops, French division. Plot threads like the opening murder or who poisoned Carrie Louise’s medicine or who injected arsenic into the chocolates are raised and then ignored. Every man is a sexist pig and every woman — who is supposed to be working for that brave new world when they’ll be treated as fully-functioning human beings with brains — is either stupid, ditzy, or both. The soundtrack, something I rarely notice, is so annoying that I couldn’t not notice it, demanding that I notice this clever plot twist or that witty repartee.

Except the plot twists are not clever and the repartee is not so witty.