Teresa reviews Third Girl (2017) a.k.a. Crimes haute couture

Teresa reviews Third Girl (2017) (a.k.a. High Fashion Crimes / Crimes haute couture) and found it’s skirts its plot for the usual pattern of high-jinks.

(c)2023 by Teresa Peschel

Fidelity to text: 1½ scissors

A woman is manipulated into thinking she’s a murderess because a man she trusts has something to hide. That’s it.

Quality of film: 2 scissors

So disappointing. Where was the haute couture? Where was the detecting? Instead, we get the ongoing junior high soap opera that is Laurence, Marlène, and Avril.

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

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

Third Girl (1966) will always be a challenge to adapt because while there’s plenty of material to work with, it’s underdeveloped and scattershot. Agatha’s writing powers were declining and when you’ve read her earlier novels, boy howdy does it show.

But what great material! A terrified young woman who’s convinced she’s a murderess because the evidence is overwhelming. Yet she can’t recall hacking someone apart with a knife. Her estranged father, returned from Africa after twenty years away. A handsome, caddish painter using her. Two roomies with secrets of their own. Suicide in Norma’s past. It’s the swinging ’60s so there are heaps of drugs of every kind. And of course, Poirot who’s learning about the one-way slide into obsolescence, irrelevance, and uselessness.

Boil that down to the bones, remove some bones, omit the flavoring, and add a junior high soap opera in place of actual policework and you get this film.

It opens so promisingly too, after Laurence disappoints Marlène with his gift when the engagement ring-sized box turns out to house the type ball from an IBM Selectric typewriter.

We learn about Maison Paget, a third-rate fashion house with a very young-looking designer, Edouard Paget; his atelier supervisor, Louise Charpentier who bears zero resemblance to the same-named character in the novel; Patricia Nollet who seems to be more than a seamstress, and a group of seamstresses slaving away.

Why do I say Paget is third-rate? Because if he’d been a star designer in 1962 (Laurence states the date), he’d have been working in Paris instead of in the backwater provinces in Lille. Every good designer dreamed of making it to Paris rather than remain stuck in the outback providing dresses to the local gentry.

Patricia (Norma Restarick) staggers into the police station after another drunken night. She woke up next to Paco Gomez’s stabbed body in a rat-infested alley, covered with blood. Well, not too much blood. Her hands and stylish coat were soaked, yet inside the police station, her white sheath is pristine. But she’s sure she did it because she was blackout drunk and afraid that Paco would rape her.

Patricia, as Laurence quickly discovers, has a traumatic past. She stabbed an uncle at age 15 and spent three years in reform school. If you listen carefully, she had a good reason to stab that uncle. Paco brought up terrible memories.

Laurence has her locked up. At no point does he mention her spotless white dress which is weak scripting. Her flawless dress would be an excellent reason for a clever man like him to question what he was being told. Instead, it’s Tricard who questions Patricia’s guilt. As it turns out, he knows her.

What’s maddening about Tricard knowing Patricia is I know the series all too well by now. Tricard is a wounded sad sack of a man. Supposedly in charge of Lille’s police force, Laurence undercuts him every step of the way. Yet Tricard as a character should have a life of his own and in this episode, we catch a glimpse. A widower, he was devastated by his wife’s death and became an alcoholic. Going to AA and cleaning up his act is how he met Patricia. He doesn’t come out and say he’s her sponsor but it sounds like he is. He watches over her. He knows she’s not guilty. He gazes at her longingly. And when the episode is over, Patricia will disappear and you’ll never hear another word about his depth of character, nor will he be given any kind of happy ending.

Patricia remains a cypher. She may be a functional alcoholic but does she have any design talent? It seems she does because she works closer with Paget than anyone else, yet you never see her designs. As in the novel, Paget adds drugs to Patricia’s flask but you never see him do it. Or Louise. Or Gigi, but more on her later.

The entire episode is loaded with similar great plot threads that go nowhere. Françoise is the hot-to-trot fashion model and Paget’s muse. She’s an off-the-rack character. Her father, though. He’s Narcisse Vermeer and has he got a past! A failed boxer who now owns a chain of casinos and gambling dens, he’s the money man behind Paget’s fashion house. Why? On the surface, it’s to keep his little girl happy. Underneath, however, Laurence learns that money laundering is going on. Avril contributes a bit of info on the subject and then the entire fascinating topic is dropped. Where did the money come from? What does Paget owe Narcisse? You’ll never learn.

And Paco Gomez, our first victim? He was a bookie for Narcisse, a delivery man for le Maison Paget, and ready to do anyone’s dirty work. Why did Louise Charpentier hire him? Because Narcisse insisted. What hold did he have over the house? Obviously not enough because Louise also fired Paco and Narcisse didn’t say a word.

Not nearly enough time was spent on Louise. Like every character other than Patricia, she has no real counterpart in the novel. She runs the atelier with an iron fist. Once Laurence begins investigating, he quickly learns she has a long history of assaulting and attacking the seamstresses working for Maison Paget. What a great reason for murder, yet her criminal background is barely touched on. You’d think this would be the first thing the atelier seamstresses would tell Avril but they don’t.

Gigi, the lead seamstress, should have been a fountain of information for Avril but instead, she pops up here and there, almost at random. She’s thrilled — as are the other women — when Avril leads a strike for better working conditions. At the climax after Louise is found stabbed to death, it turns out that Gigi was working with Paget all along. This comes completely out of left field. There was no set up at all, not even her exchanging significant glances or a whispered conversation with Paget. It felt wrong. Suddenly, after spending the entire episode as a calming influence in the atelier, she becomes crazy woman.

Another irritation but this may have been bad subtitles is how Avril got the sewing job. Even in the provinces, a seamstress in a couture house had to be great at sewing. Avril demonstrates her skill with a needle doing a triple cross stitch on a heavily embroidered jacket sleeve (which we don’t get a closeup of, darn it). I have never heard of a triple cross stitch. I couldn’t find information about it. This probably is a specific hand-stitch a couture sewist would use but without the correct translation, you won’t find out what it is or looks like or how Avril wowed Paget, Louise, and the seamstresses.

Then there’s the dress that Marlène wears near the climax. If you think it looks not right for 1962, that’s because it looked to me like a knockoff of a Vivienne Westwood mini-crini from 1985. But then we know Paget steals other designers’ ideas.

What a disappointment. Too much plot that goes nowhere and not nearly enough fashion.