IMDB meta-data is run time of 1 hour and 25 minutes, rated 7.0 by 99 cinematizens.
Genre: krimi, Maigret (bien sûr)
Verdict: (Où est Fantômas?)
Long-serving and long-suffering Inspector Joseph Lognon is shot in the street and lies comatose near death; Maigret comes to investigate. Lognon is a recurrent figure (six times in all) in the Maigret oeuvre, and we know a little about him. He is dogged but unimaginative, a slave to his invalid wife at home, and while conscientious to a fault he seems jinxed at work, i.e., if there is hole then he is the one who will step in it. Maigret is one of the few people who is patient enough to suffer Lognon’s constant bad humour.
Now that I have seen four of these 1990s revivals of Maigret, clearly the aim was to re-new the franchise by changing the settings, and in some cases, revising the plots. The aim was not to be faithful to the text, but to refresh them for a new audience. One might think of the 1940s Rathbone version of an updated Sherlock Holmes foiling Nazis. Or so I imagine the spiel was. In any case, this episode works well. It is transposed from Montmartre to Helsinki. That means Maigret must work with and through a translator, and the few Finns who speak French do so slowly with a word-order syntax. Thank you very much.
In the novel the above-suspicion art dealer is Dutch, but here he is Swedish, perhaps, to play on Finnish prejudices about big brother. Once again a German with a murky wartime past is inserted into the plot who is not in the book. In the 1990s I would guess that the noticeable tinge of hostility to Germans is in the producers not in the audience of the day.
Again, now that Maigret is in far Helsinki there is no team, but only the telephone which is put to much use since all the persons of interest have French connections. It takes an hour to make a call to Paris, and the reception is terrible. Plus there is that long distance lag and echo in the voices. Remember that?
Once again Cremer is fine as Maigret, slow, persistent, and motivated since Lognon is a brother-in-arms, though a secretive one with a chip on his shoulder. To capitalise on the location shooting, a second film was done in Finland.
Yes, I read this book, too, and in neither the book nor the film is the title quite explained. The woman who paints upstairs before the windows once wears a white robe to mislead Maigret. Did she ever do it before? Or did the mad and bad Igor wear it? But the red-headed Englishman was the shooter.
Answers in the comments below.
Having a spent a few days in Helsinki years ago, in this film I enjoyed some of the streetscapes, waterfront, and art deco architecture, but got no glimpse of those giants that guard the central train station.