Le Crime est notre affaire (2008) - film review

Whilst her husband Bélisaire is content with their peaceful retirement, Prudence is slowly dying of boredom.  She pines for a real-life crime mystery that will tax her intellect and bring some excitement back into her life.  Her wish is granted when she is visited by an aunt who claims to have witnessed a woman being strangled on a passing train..  Prudence immediately begins her investigation, but Bélisaire is sceptical, particularly when no corpse has been found in the vicinity of the supposed crime.  Undeterred and allowing herself to be guided by her intuition, Prudence gets herself hired as a cook at the château which she believes holds the key to mystery.  Her intuition has not deceived her - she soon finds the dead body of a woman, hidden in a private museum belonging to her employer, the sour-tempered Roderick Charpentier.  But who is the woman and what is her relationship to the Charpentier family?

Not long after scoring a palpable hit as crime-fighting duo Prudence and Bélisaire Beresford in Pascal Thomas’s Mon petit doigt m’a dit... (2005), Catherine Frot and André Dussollier are reunited for another round of camp amateur sleuthing, British-style.  Le Crime est notre affaire is Thomas’s third Agatha Christie adaptation, following his slick L’Heure zéro (2007), and is based on Christie’s novel 4.50 from Paddington.  Those with long memories and nothing better to do with their time will recall that this novel had been previously adapted as Murder She Said (1961), one of a series of films in which the incomparable Margaret Rutherford offered her unique (some would say heretical) interpretation of Miss Marple.

This film may be set in our time but it immediately evokes the world of the original Agatha Christie novels (far more successfully than the Margaret Rutherford films ever did).  It combines Christie’s penchant for the sinister and the subtly macabre with a characteristically Gallic sense of fun.  Unlike previous attempts to introduce humour into Christie-style whodunits, the comedy is in sympathy with the mystery/thriller elements of the film; it does not send-up its subject but instead serves to lighten the mood and deflect our attention from the clues that will identify the murderer.  The Queen of Crime may not (as far as we know) have employed a gag in which a man in a kilt gets trapped above a subway vent (à la Marilyn Monroe), but there is still a fair smattering of humour in her books, and for once this film gets the comedy quotient about right.

As in their first Christie outing, Catherine Frot and André Dussollier have a natural comedy rapport and form what is unquestionably the most entertaining crime-fighting double act since Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce.  Frot plays the Miss Marple role in the original novel, although her and Dussolier’s characters are actually based on two of Christie’s lesser known sleuths - the amiable partners in crime, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford.  Assisted by some juicy dialogue, Frot and Dussollier both give a tour de force performance and revel in the comedy situations into which they are thrown (the highpoint being the aforementioned kilt and vent gag).  Unlike Margaret Rutherford, who had an aura of Churchillian invincibility about her in her Miss Marple films, Frot’s feisty heroine is much more vulnerable, and director Pascal Thomas skilfully uses this to beef up that one essential ingredient for a good thriller-whodunit: suspense.  Assisting (and hindering) Frot and Dussollier in their investigations is a stellar cast which includes such talented performers as Hippolyte Girardot, Melvil Poupaud and the aptly named Claude Rich (the latter hilarious as an irascible chatelain who has the table manners of an industrial suction pump).  Thomas scripts and directs the film with his usual aplomb and, with a little help from a superb cast (and a cheeky little mouse), delivers what is assuredly one of the most enjoyable Agatha Christie adaptations to date.  Something to exercise the little grey cells and stretch those laugh lines, n’est-ce pas?

© James Travers 2011

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