Ding Dingue Dong (Les Petits Meurtres d'Agatha Christie)

Ding Dingue Dong  is the 24th episode of season 2 of the French TV series Les Petits Meurtres d'Agatha Christie. It was produced by Escazal Films and France Télevisions, directed by Christophe Campos and first aired on France 2 on 6 September 2019. It is an adaptation of the Agatha Christie novel Evil Under the Sun.

Synopsis
Like the rest of the episodes of season 2 of this series, the original Christie detective characters have been replaced. The lead roles are taken by a French detective Commissaire Swan Laurence assisted by a journalist Alice Avril and Laurence's secretary Marlene. The action is set in Lille in the 1950s.

In this episode Marlene turns up for work without her makeup and says she no longer has the will to carry on. Doctors recommend a rest cure at an institution. Meanwhile Laurence is called away to the Clinique des Lilas, a psychiatric hospital where a patient appears to have hanged himself. After speaking to the doctorrs there, Laurence decides the clinic is suitable for Marlene and he checks her in. But not long after, Marlene comes across the body of Clarisse Rodier, the wife of the director. Things get complicated when it is revealed that Laurence has been having an affair with her and he is arrested. Alice goes undercover as a nurse in order to clear him.

Plot Summary
(may contain spoilers - click on expand to read)

(work in progress)

One of the patients, Anatole Bouvier, appears to have hanged himself. He was unstable and had a persecution complex but Dr Rodier, the director, cannot believe that he killed himself. They had been making progress in his treatment.

From his visit, Laurence has an idea. The institution would be ideal for Marlene. The place is fully booked but the dead man has just created a vacancy. He books a room and gets Marlene checked in.

Meanwhile Glissant examines Anatole's body and is sceptical about the suicide idea. Anatole had been prescribed a tranquilizer shortly before his death but then Anatole also had enough morphine in him to render him unconscious. Dominique Lebrun, the head nurse, insists that no one could get hold of morphine--she always keeps the drugs cabinet locked. But Laurence discovers this is not so--he walks into Dominique's office with her and finds Adele, Dr Rodier's daughter, standing in front of the open drugs cabinet. It seems anybody could have taken the morphine.

Marlene settles into the hospital routine and despite her depression she listens and observes and soon gets to learn the personal dynamics in the place. Dominique is secretly in love with Rodier, the head of the clinic. His 15 year old daughter Adele, although not a patient, is described as a nutcase by patient and ex drug addict Felix Jacquel. Adele hates her step mother, Mrs Clarisse Rodier. Meanwhile the beautiful Clarisse is trying to attract the attention of clinic deputy, Dr Nathan Steiner and succeeding at it, much to the chagrin of Steiner's wife, Marie. In one scene we see Rodier try to warn Clarisse off Steiner, but to no avail.

Sitting in the garden, Marlene witnesses Marie berate Steiner for his attraction to Clarisse. Marie walks off to do some shopping in the village. Steiner decides not to join her. Instead he asks Marlene to join him for a walk.

They go through some woods into a clearing and discover a body in the grass near a hut. It's Clarisse. Steiner stays with the body and sends Marlene to call the police.

At the crime scene is the enthusiastic Arlette Carmouille, newly graduated as a uniformed police officer. She takes Marlene in tow and takes a statement with startling revelations: Clarisse was having an affair with Laurence. In fact, Marlene, Laurence and Alice were having dinner recently when Clarisse turned up angrily demanding that Laurence spend the night with her. Laurence had thrown her out saying he would strangle her to shut her up. She investigates further and reports to Tricard. Laurence is locked up as a suspect.

Alice goes in undercover as a nurse to continue the investigation. Tricard also investigates, in his own way, But Laurence is not long with a new idea. With Glissant's help, he fakes a violent psychotic attack and gets "committed" to the nursing home as a patient.

Alice befriends Adèle Rodier. She catches Adele tying to steal drugs from the pharmacy. Adele tells Alice that she hated her step mother, and that she might have been the one who killed her. Earlier she had asked Alice if it is possible to kill someone by wishing her dead, or if it is possible to kill someone without remembering it.

Meanwhile Marlene has been anxious that someone has been going through the things in her room. Laurence thinks she isn't imagining it--this was Anatole Bouvier's room. The killer could have come back to destroy some evidence. They find written under a chair: "She's going to die ... they said so ... but no one listens to old Anatole." He must have overhead two people plotting to kill Clarisse, or the killer threatening to kill her.

Wandering the grounds, Laurence spots Félix Jacquel, a patient, approaching the hut near the scene of Clarisse's murder. Félix opens some floorboards and plants some money into the cavity. Laurence also finds some strands of blonde hair near the hut.

Comparison with the original story
(may contain spoilers - click on expand to read)
 * The setting is changed to a psychiatric clinique in Lille. Many of the main characters in the original are paralleled as the clinique staff and their family members. The clinic's patients fill out the action but they are not really parallels of the guests at the Jolly Roger Hotel except perhaps for Felix.
 * The mechanic of the murder and how the killer obtains an alibi is the same. Here Steiner uses Marlene as his Emily Brewster equivalent to establish his alibi since they discover the body together.
 * Marlene fixes the time she found the body by refering to the 11 am church bell (hence the title of the episode). This is the same as the noonday gun in the 1982 Ustinov adaptation. In the original, the time is simply fixed by what Emily Brewster testifies.
 * In the original, Christine uses Linda and an altered watch to establish her alibi. Here Marie Steiner does not put up such an elaborate scheme. She merely goes off for shopping in the village, with Marlene witnessing her departure. In effect she has no cast iron alibi here.
 * There is a drug sideplot like in the original which involves using a hut near the crime scene as the "dead drop". This is similar to the cave at Pixy Cove.
 * The motive for killing Clarisse is fairly similar to that in the original. Steiner was heavily in debt. By responding to the romantic advances of Clarisse, he had managed to get her to withdraw large sums of money which she passed to him. At some point he became concerned that she would tell her husband and so he had to kill her off. This backstory is discovered when Laurence checked Clarisse's bank account, just like Inspector Colgate checked with Arlena's lawyers about her finances.
 * There is also the same suicide sideplot involving Adele Rodier, who is the Linda Marshall parallel, although for different reasons. In the original, Linda read up on witchcraft and thought she had done something which caused Arlena's death and hence she attempted suicide by taking sleeping pills. Here Adele doesn't attempt anything intended to harm Clarisse. She suspected her father had killed Clarisse and tried to take her own life in order to protect him.
 * The plot device of a fake tan and the bottle which thrown out of the window and almost hits Emily Brewster is not used. Here the equivalent plot device is that Marlene recalls that when she first saw the body it was barefoot. Later, it had shoes on. Also related is that Laurence finds hairs on a shrub near the crime scene and Glissant finds that it is not real hair but from a wig.

Cast

 * Samuel Labarthe as Swan Laurence
 * Blandine Bellavoir as Alice Avril
 * Élodie Frenck as Marlène Leroy
 * Dominique Thomas as Ernest Tricard
 * Marie Berto as Arlette Carmouille
 * Cyril Gueï as Timothée Glissant
 * Arnaud Binard as Doctor Louis Rodier
 * Bérénice Baoo as Clarisse Rodier
 * Kevin Garnichat as Nathan Steiner
 * Chloé Chaudoye as Marie Steiner
 * Maira Schmitt as Adèle Rodier
 * Barbara Monin as Dominique Lebrun
 * Karim Rouabah as Anatole Bouvier
 * Emmanuel Bordier as Félix Jacquel
 * David-Alexandre Berthier as Philippe Angles
 * Philippe Capel as Père Andre
 * Nicolette Picheral as Marguerite Michel
 * Serge Dubois as the man with the dog Hercule
 * Bubulle as Bubulle the goldfish

Filming locations

 * Domaine des Pères Oblats, Velaines, Celles, Wallonia - Clinique de Lilas . The domaine des Oblats was a former monastery now a housing cooperative.