“Murder on the Orient Express” by Kenneth Branagh. The new version of the famous detective Agatha Christie with the stars of the first magnitude

Kenneth Branagh's film “Murder on the Orient Express” is the film version of the Agatha Christie novel of the same name, in which the director himself played the role of the great detective Hercule Poirot. In addition to Branagh, a dozen more actors of the first magnitude played in the film - Michelle Pfeiffer, Penélope Cruz, Johnny Depp, Judi Dench and others. In my opinion, “Murder on the Orient Express” is a large-scale fairy tale that is undoubtedly worth watching.

©Depositphotos

The main problem of any critic is over-sophistication. What we stigmatize as banal can be a revelation for an ordinary viewer, and he will immediately call the position of the critic in this situation arrogant. However, how fortunate it is to be on the other side of the barricades and feel like ordinary Homo sapiens, who bought a ticket for a film about which you do not know anything. Alternatively, at least, you do not know the most important.

Extensive entry - an attempt to justify. I am the rare person who did not read Agatha Christie's “Murder on the Orient Express” and did not see any of his screen versions. Of course, it would not be worth anything to prepare and fill the gap (everyone has them, isn't it) before being acquainted with the new film. However, how to miss a rare chance to see a detective, frozen with impatience and waiting for a denouement? Therefore, now, when colleagues contemptuously - and, for sure, legally - to compare the new picture with the old ones and compare them with the original source, I will ingenuously and honestly write: the film Kenneth Branagh is a great entertainment, a great example of a smart genre film.

©Depositphotos

It is clear that for Christie, the genius of plot constructions, the train stuck in a snowfall, is not so much a metaphor as a convenient enclosed space - necessary to ask the Hercule Poirot (and the reader / viewer) another puzzle and elegantly solve it. However, Kenneth Branagh is still a cinematographer, and for him “Orient Express” is one of the full participants in the action, its main characters. The movie once began with the Lumières "The Arrival of the Mail Train". Since then, the locomotive has become a symbol of new art and progress as such. Here, this train instead of rushing forward at full speed, scaring and admiring the public, stops at full speed. Stop, progress, welcome to the cozy British tradition, in a kind of Narnia, where time flows differently. When it is snowing outside the window, everyone will want to get comfortable in the dining car and listen to the old-old story. Even if you know it by heart.

©Depositphotos

How can you resent the theatrical exaggeration of the behavior of the masked characters played by folk artists? Each of them is just a gift, and some are especially valuable. For the first time after the endless Captain Jack Sparrow, Johnny Depp (the demonic businessman of Ratchett), who was desperately grimacing and very funny Willem Dafoe (Gerhard Hardman), who caught Michelle Pfeiffer's second wind (Mrs Hubbard), played such a juicy role. Thinning and vampire charming Sergei Polunin as the Hungarian Count Andrenyi and Grand Dame Judi Dench, who did not refuse the pleasure to play in the English film adaptation of the English book Princess Dragomiroff. In addition, Penélope Cruz, Josh Gad, Daisy Ridley, Derek Jacobi. Well, Kenneth Branagh's mustache, of course, is not by chance so huge and comical. Here everything is grotesque, as it should be in a fictional story; all the more, stories where everything is constantly invented (to put it more simply, they lie). The style of the painting is demonstratively far from the psychological realism that most interpreters for some reason consider mandatory for a detective genre. That is why “Murder on the Orient Express” is a luxurious movie, a joy for the eyes and ears. In essence, a large-scale tale.

©Depositphotos

The locomotive sniffing the snow reminds of the Christmas “The Polar Express” by Robert Zemeckis, and even more about the “Hogwarts Express” from the Joanne Rowling novel series (the second most famous English writer after Agatha Christie) and their screen versions. It is not without reason that many of the actors, starting with Branagh himself, took part in films about the Harry Potter universe, and one of the heroines of the novel is also called Hermione. In other words, “Orient Express” is not just a means of transportation, but also a magical transport, transporting characters and spectators from the ordinary world to the magic, conditional. Only in it such scenes are possible (in the hope of the same ignorant, we will not elaborate on the details of intrigue) - not about crime and punishment, as in most detectives, but about reward and mercy.

©Depositphotos

From the detective you expect increased attention to trifles, but Branagh's “Murder on the Orient Express”, on the contrary, turned out to be sweeping. In the film, a huge number of common plans, the director himself admires his picturesque even more than the viewer does. The plans from above are repeated more often than others - as if the sight of an all-seeing God, with whom Poirot is closer to the final, compares himself directly. By the way, Branagh’s Belgian detective is not a small, pot-bellied and ridiculous outsider, as in many film adaptations, but a real Hero with a capital letter, not in the mockery called Heracles. His Olympic calmness contrasts spectacularly with the eccentric behavior of the rest of the train’s passengers, each of whom has reason to be nervous. It is hard not to appreciate the beauty of the colorful characters' seating in the climax scene - frontally, at a long table, just like in “Last Supper”, against the background of a bottomless black tunnel, they listen to the verdict of Poirot.