Agatha
                                   
Director: Michael Apted
Year: 1979
Rating: 6.0
This feels like such a curiosity now. A delicate bauble. The type of film that today would never be signed off on by a studio with two big stars and beautiful production values. Everything about it just looks good – it radiates at times and the period details are perfect but the plot to all but Agatha Christie fans must seem as obscure as a worm hole. But back in 1979 perhaps not so much as Christie had just passed away three years previously. It is a made-up story of a real event and a part of you wonders whether that is something you should do. Her family didn’t think so and refused to give their permission but the filmmakers went ahead and did it anyway. In 1926 the premier English writer of mysteries went missing. Her car was found having had an accident, a huge search was made dragging lakes and looking for a dead body in the fields. She re-appeared eleven days later claiming she had amnesia. She stuck with that story all her life. No researcher has been able to shed light on it.



So, the film writers fill in those eleven days with their own imagination and decide to throw in dramatic events right out of a Christie novel. Of course, they could have had the author do anything in those eleven days – go on a secret mission for England or go on a very long walk around the Isles. They settle on a story that feels more pedestrian and yet unlikely. You have to wonder what the point is but the performances are very good and the surroundings elegant and refined. So, it is an enjoyable watch luxuriating in those aspects.



Christie is played by Vanessa Redgrave and whether she is anything like the real Christie is hard to say but she creates as real a person as you can imagine – vulnerable, broken and yet whole.  She is having marital issues – in both real life and the film – with her husband Archie (a disdainful Timothy Dalton) having an affair with his secretary. Christie leaves her home and has the car accident and decides to disappear under the name of the secretary. She checks into the same hotel and they both use the same facilities at the health club. One being an electric chair that if used properly made one lose weight.



Meanwhile, she has been tracked down by an American reporter played by Dustin Hoffman in a very restrained performance. He also takes on another name and begins a flirtatious relationship with her. Very little of note seems to be happening – life in a superior old-fashioned hotel; the nightly dance, the afternoon tea, the efficient staff , the game of pool in the evening – no one recognizes her though her disappearance and picture are splashed all over the newspapers. But this is Christie and there has to be a payoff. And there is. In real life she got a divorce from her husband, was persuaded to go to Bagdad and met an archeologist and was happily married to him till her death. Directed by Michael Apted in his breakout film.