Branagh’s Poirot: a detective with a soul
Death on the Nile is quintessential Agatha Christie: exotic location, a bunch of characters from different social classes in an enclosed space – a boat on the Nile -, all of them with a motive to kill. So there is the inevitable main murder, the subsequent ones and the eccentric Poirot ‘casually’ there to solve the mystery. But this is Branagh’s Poirot, and Branagh’s story, which is a different cup of tea. Branagh goes behind Poirot’s notorious impenetrable mask to create a round character with feelings who faced events in his life that have made him what he is now. In this study in character the inner humanity of the detective breaks through his notorious aplomb, and we see him fight to control his emotions and pulsions. At the centre of it all is life’s driving force: love – felt, denied, obtained and lost – always so very close to death. Love, jealousy and hatred are the motives of the novel’s plot with its eternal triangle made of a man and two rival women. Love kills, physically in the plot, and also metaphorically as far the detective is concerned. In fact we get into Poirot’s biography and psyche in the film incipit, set during WW1 in the deadly trenches, in a wasteland landscape which reminds us of the pictures of the modernist English painter Paul Nash. Like in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, the war brings love and death into the young Poirot, giving the spectator an explanation of the external protecting shield the character has built in time. But love can create a crack even in virtual armours and can come back anytime, in the most surprising forms, regardless of age, race and profession. So we see Poirot solving a love murder mystery and at the same time fighting to keep past, maybe future, love memories and dreams at bay. Shall he make it? Get to the end of the movie to find out, maybe….
This movie is also embellished by a stunning visual, partly computer-generated, of Egypt: the pyramids, the big river, the desert, the sun, the temples, create a wonderful setting for the whodunit. Moreover, the soundtrack is another great surprise, all blues and rhythm-and-blues of the 30s, the decade the story was written and set. There are also coloured characters in the film, even mixed engagements, a taboo for conservative Christie.
In conclusion, no doubt this is Branagh’s own Death on the Nile: the director has taken the novel’s ‘skeleton’ to create his own fictional world, with the usual gentle charming touch and not creating a mere remake of the 1978 film with the same title (actually this is a follow up to his 2017 Murder on the Orient Express). While watching, keep your attention till the very end: what happens to Poroit when he finally comes back to London?
Follow up:
(…) Yet adapting Agatha Christie as mass 21st-Century entertainment is not without its complications: they are products of the time they were written in, the mid-20th Century, and arguably reflect some unsavoury attitudes not least when it comes to racism, xenophobia and colonialism. The question is therefore: how do you translate and update Agatha Christie – or not – for the modern age? …