6 hours ago
4
I don’t know about art, but I know what I like: cosy crime. I’m excited by Flemish series This Is Not a Murder Mystery (U&Drama, Wednesday, 8pm, and streaming on Channel 4), which offers a classy shot of both. Silent movie credits tell us the year is 1936. An English aristocrat is hosting a private show of surrealist artists, who are all on the cusp of major celebrity. Following a wild party a week before the show, we see René Magritte wake up in bed, next to a dead woman. Their heads have been wrapped in shrouds, in a ghoulish recreation of his own painting The Lovers. Fame can lead artists to lose their heads, but this is something else.
The beak arrive in the double-act form of DCI Thistlethwaite and DC Quant. They lock down the estate, along with its bohemian guests: Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Man Ray, performance artist Sheila Legge and the American war photographer Lee Miller. Magritte is determined to clear his name, but as the show approaches, the theatrical murders mount up. Each crime pays twisted homage to the masterpieces of the artists present, who are also suspects.
The title is a nod to another famous Magritte painting, The Treachery of Images, or “The Pipe One” to you and me. Young René is the star here, played by Pierre Gervais: a horse-jawed, voluminously thatched newcomer who looks about 8ft tall. I had to turn the brightness down on my TV every time he batted his reproachful lashes at the cocaine-fuelled bohemians resisting his questions. (That actually is a pipe in my pocket, but I was also pleased to see him.)
DC Quant lets sexy Magritte poke around crime scenes, interrogate his friends and hold on to evidence. (Would she do that if he looked like Diego Rivera?) Magritte is driven to uncover the murderer, as psychic compensation for his mother’s death when he was a child. That actually happened. The show’s appeal lies in mixing fact and fantasy, incorporating real surrealist works, and trading in the lore of these characters. Picasso will only drink sparkling water, the head servant reminds his employer, while Sigmund Freud “never shuts up at dinner”.
British TV is often just a man walking around a garden centre, or asking if you remember pickled onion Space Raiders. So I appreciate the show’s refreshing European pretentiousness. Magritte introduces Quant to repoussoir: a painting technique that creates depth of field. Police miss background detail, is his point. “Artists speak a specific language – let me be your interpreter,” he says. A visual artist, and a foreign one, flirtily offering to lead an investigation in which he is the chief suspect? Wild idea. You know what else is a wild idea? Lobster telephone. No further questions.
A killer’s calling card, their quasi-artistic signature style, is a familiar TV trope. Actual artists as murderers is a fun twist. Imagine if Damien Hirst bisected a parish vicar and pickled him in formaldehyde. Or Louise Bourgeois swaddled a neighbour in their own hair, suspending them from the ceiling like a beef carcass. The show revels in staging its own flamboyant, grisly set pieces. The mise en scène of these murders, blushes Magritte – “is beautiful,” purrs Gala Dalí, who’s portrayed as a bit of a nympho.
With René getting his Poirot on, listening at doors and hiding in alcoves, there’s a risk too many cops might spoil the broth. To spin its yarn, the show must make its detectives superfluous, if not blind. Thistlethwaite is approaching his 365th murder case, the milestone at which he has decided to retire. “Because of you, that’s become a possibility,” he reflects, proudly. “How do you mean?” puzzles his protege, whose deductive skills could use some sharpening.
The real artists are strikingly cast though, and carry the day. They include Iñaki Mur as a rake thin, tremulous Dalí and an ethereally beautiful Florence Hall as Lee Miller, who also carries a glass revolver and hand-chiselled salt bullets. There’s irresistible gloss amid the grisliness. This is not just cosy crime. This is Belgian cosy crime, studded with artistic Easter eggs and enrobed in sumptuous 1930s decor. Although, if someone doesn’t shout “I was framed” before the end, I want my money back.
English (US)