Teresa Reviews With the Snap of a Finger (2023)

Teresa reviews With the Snap of a Finger (2023), (a.k.a. En un Claquement de doight) from Les Petits Muertres and wishes they had focused on the story and not on the stars.

(c)2024 by Teresa Peschel

Agatha adjacent? 1½ psychics
The supernatural trappings turn out to be real instead of a coverup. An unwanted son grows up to murder his father.

Quality of movie: 2½ psychics
A disappointment. None of the characters got enough screen time and important backstories got skipped entirely.

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

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

Darn. And Season Three of Les Petits had been going so well! Alas, we’ve returned to the unfortunate form used so frequently in Season Two, where you get hijinks with our stars while the murder plot is sadly underdeveloped to the point where you only know a fact because you’re told. Not because you watched some acting from the suspects, proving what you were told.

There’s no evidence.

Which I suppose fits with an episode about a psychic who sees ghosts of the dear departed who couldn’t depart and who reads the room so well he knows things he couldn’t possibly know. You also don’t get an explanation for Frédéric Light’s (a stage name because Light sounds so much better for a psychic than Brunet) paranormal abilities. Was he born with them? And daddy dearest realized when Frédéric was a little lad and proved so telepathic and clairvoyant that he could use him to make buckets of money?
Or is it all a fraud, engineered by daddy dearest? This seems unlikely because we see proof onscreen that Frédéric has extrasensory abilities. He sees Gréco’s long-dead mother. He knows too much about the people he meets.
*annie’s mother seen*

But! We’re also informed by Commissaire Legoff that long ago, he’d arrested Frédéric Light’s father, Jean Brunet, for a variety of frauds and grifts. No grifter worth his palmed dice could pass up a chance to fool the public into willingly giving him money via a fake medium. And if the medium is his own son, firmly under his thumb, who might actually be psychic? All the better.
There’d be just enough truth to convince the skeptics and local law enforcement while daddy dearest picked the marks’ pockets.
But no. You get only the barest outline of Jean Brunet’s fraudulent past. You barely get a taste of why he hired the private detective to follow his son around; supposedly to prove to skeptical law enforcement that the audience didn’t contain plants? Jean Brunet’s got a contentious relationship with his daughter-in-law, Isabelle. Why does he dislike her so? Because she might persuade Frédéric to live his own life, no longer supporting daddy dearest? You get only scraps of this story, too.

And what’s the relationship between Jean Brunet and Lauren Martin, girl assistant to Frédéric?

Is Isabelle jealous of her close working relationship with her husband? Is Isabelle concerned about Lauren’s close working relationship with her hated father-in-law? Again, there are hints that it could go either way. Or both! But you won’t learn more.

You also won’t learn anything about Philippe Dubac, the private detective Jean Brunet hired to watch his son’s performances. Philippe exists to be stabbed by a hapless member of the audience, who saw her abusive husband courtesy of Frédéric’s performance. Philippe began a torrid affair with Isabelle, leading her to question why she’s married to that wimpy psychic wearing far too much eyeliner. But when Gréco confronts Isabelle about Philippe’s true inclinations, we’ve only Gréco’s word for Philippe’s tomcat ways. If she’s got a diary proving he went through women like Hershey’s Kisses, why doesn’t she show the diary to Isabelle and us?

We just have to believe what we’re told.

Oh, and when Isabelle runs off to find herself at the height of the investigation? We get nothing about where she went or even very much about why; only that Frédéric is concerned. Isn’t he psychic? Shouldn’t he be able to figure this out?
Isabelle isn’t the only suspect who’s woefully underwritten. We suddenly learn, near the climax, that Lauren who hovered suspiciously in the background, belongs firmly in the foreground when she visits the police station to tell all. But we don’t learn anything about her checkered past or why Jean Brunet, noted conman, fell for her story. Instead, again, we’re told.
And of course, this leads us to Professor Hans Keredine, Rose’s favorite psychology professor from university. He’s tall, dark, handsome, and a skilled hypnotist. He’s on his way to Boston, leaving France behind. But curiously, he stops in Lille (way the heck out in the provinces and not on the way to anywhere) and there’s no explanation. He runs into Rose and it’s clear that although — as an ethical professor — he didn’t chase her when she was his student, he’s happy to pursue her now. This leads to comedy and tragedy as Rose, a 30-year-old virgin, wishes to change that state with her beloved professor.

But she’s too nervous and drunk to listen to his sad tale of woe, and so, once again, what should have been significant clues about his backstory whiz by as though they were ghosts.

Professor Keredine and Lauren the assistant turn out to be connected, but there’s not even a whisper until the climax that they grew up together. Not a single scene together, when they could have glanced at each other. Not a single hint that Jean Brunet, like Simeon Lee in Hercule Poirot’s Christmas (1938), fathered an illegitimate son on a housemaid he forced. This was a chance for Commissaire Legoff to show why he’s in charge of the Lille police station, but no. He knows Jean Brunet’s past but each time you could get actual, you know, police work such as discovering what happened in the past from the detective who was there, it all vanishes like ghosts in the noonday sun.

Which leads back to Frédéric being a real psychic (although he sure didn’t understand his own wife’s mind nor did he figure out who murdered Philippe and if he saw ghosts, shouldn’t he have gotten a message? Or a similar message from his father?) and seeing Gréco’s long-dead mother, Thérèse. She’s been unable to depart this mortal plane because she has unfinished business. Gréco believed she’d died valiantly, shot by the Germans while she was rescuing Jewish children from the concentration camps.

What was Thérèse’s unfinished business? That she so desperately needed to tell her daughter (unlike Jean Brunet telling his son who could see him who shot him)? It made sense, but a moment of thought meant it didn’t make sense at all. If Thérèse was a mere supporter of La Resistance and was hit by a car, instead of a daring field agent shot during the line of duty, okay. I’d bet that after the war, far more people claimed to be members of La Resistance than actually had been at the time. They exaggerated their heroics. But Gréco’s grandmother told her the story about her mother’s heroism. Gréco’s grandmother was either lied to or she chose to inflate her daughter’s heroism to console both herself and her granddaughter over her loss. But this possibility never arises, nor, apparently, did Gréco do some investigating to learn the particulars about her mother’s heroism. If she had, she might have learned from a police report about the accident. Even during a war, reports are still written and filed.

So many plot holes. So many lost opportunities. So many chances to be better. The high points don’t compensate for the lows with this episode.