Awix is the expert. For ridiculous opinions on cinema, you get me.

Murder on the Orient Express, 2017

Director: Kenneth Branagh

Writers: Agatha Christie (novel), Michael Green (screenplay)

Stars: Too many to count, including Kenneth Branagh's moustache

Kenneth Branagh is wasted on the British. They didn't like this film.

I see evil on this train.

How do I loathe Agatha Christie? Let me count the ways. I dislike her prose. I detest her snobbery. I cannot abide the fact that her readers insist her plots are 'clever' and require deep thought. And yes, I've read her. I've even watched every single episode (except for the last one, I was afraid he died, and I'm soft-hearted) of David Suchet's Poirot portrayals. He's good, and the sets are wonderful, but the stories are drivel, in my opinion. I was even in an Agatha Christie play once. I enjoyed the company, but the play itself was wearisome. The dialogue was almost impossible to memorise. And to this day, I can't remember much of what happened, other than that we made people laugh, and we had to be careful with the furniture so we could give it back to the antique dealer who lent it to us. Agatha Christie's plots are the most forgettable in literary history.

One thing about Christie: I can read or watch the stories again and again, because I've always forgotten the plot the minute I put down the book, or the film is over. I have a phenomenal memory, I'm told. I recall weird connections, such as the fact that Casanova read Mary of Agreda while imprisoned in The Leads. My department head once said in exasperation, 'How do you know that? Never mind that: why do you know that?' My brain squirrels away arcane trivia. But I can't retain a Christie plot. There's not enough room in my head for stuff like that.

Fun fact: Palaeobiologist Douglas Erwin has called the multiple-causation theory of the Permian-Triassic Mass Extinction Event the Murder on the Orient Express Model. I am delighted to know this. I will still know it, even when I have forgotten the plot again.

But I will always remember Branagh's film. It's a gem. I'm glad we ventured out in the cold to go over to the laughably tiny mall, just so we could sit in an almost-empty cinema and watch it on the big screen. And I don't care what they say: the CGI was just right. Not too little, not too much. It felt like you were on that train. Let the trendy critics cavil if they will. The bit with the eggs was genuinely funny. I did realise they weren't really in Jerusalem when he stuck a walking stick into the 'Wailing Wall'. There are some things film crews can't get away with, even if Branagh's people did kill the Duke of Marlborough's fish.

The thing is, I think, that for most people, Agatha Christie is one of those guilty pleasures, like those horrible Bond films. You know, what Alan Bennett rightly called 'snobbery with violence'. Christie and Fleming invite their audiences to indulge in a private fantasy in which they belong to the 'right set' in a 'right world'. In these private fantasy worlds, you can get away with murder – but only if you're the 'right sort'. As Colin Wilson pointed out years ago, this kind of fantasy is particularly attractive to people who don't actually belong to the 'right set', but really wish they did.

This kind of fantasy is also fragile. It doesn't do to make mock. And Kenneth Branagh starts out by making rather blatant mock. I suspect that's why he's getting all the mean reviews.

Okay, that, and the moustache.

Branagh's Poirot isn't a parody. He's just a different reading. It's as if the actor/director took a look at the material from a Shakespearean viewpoint. You can perform Shakespeare in any way you like: change the locale to a space station or make all the actors wear bathing suits, if you choose. You can portray Hamlet as a dithering intellectual, a determined politician, or a raving loony (we're looking at you, David Tennant). And people will say, 'Well, that was an interesting choice.' But change one thing about the traditional 'tennis, anyone?' take on the interwar snob-fest, and they'll cry foul. Or yell, 'What is that moustache doing there?'

And yet. . . Branagh's Poirot is pretty much as Christie first described him. In The Mysterious Affair at Styles, she wrote:

His moustache was very stiff and military. The neatness of his attire was almost incredible. I believe a speck of dust would have caused him more pain than a bullet wound.

What did a military moustache look like in 1916?

Like that. Those are Belgian generals in 1917. That's courtesy of a contemporary news service and the ever-lovin' Library of Congress. You don't believe they were common? You object to that tuft of hair under Branagh's lower lip? Here's a whole row of Belgians.

Branagh's Poirot, I would argue, is a Shakespearean hero. He's acting in a Shakespearean tragedy: over the top, magical realism and all. Stuck in snowy Croatia rather than on the seacoast of Bohemia. Faced with absurdity upon absurdity, as the ridiculous clues pile up and the even more ludicrous backstory narrates itself. Branagh's Poirot is a man who, as he explains, sees the world as it should be – and because it can never match up to that perfection, he notes all the discrepancies. That's what makes him 'probably the world's greatest detective'. That's also what makes him a tragic figure. The world is unraveling – largely because self-indulgent people like those in Agatha Christie stories believe it should cater to their whims. In the end, even Hercule Poirot has to give up.

As he told the governess in Jerusalem, 'I do not slay the lion.'

This film may not be your grandmother's Agatha Christie. But that is a historically correct moustache, darn it.

Dmitri Gheorgheni Archive

Dmitri Gheorgheni

27.11.17 Front Page

Back Issue Page