After the great success of the previous “Murder on the Orient Express”, the eclectic Kenneth Branagh returned to the crime scene and picked up another Agatha Christie masterpiece, “Murder on the Nile”. The operation seems to be the same: to create a great spectacular film that reaches everyone, not betraying the original spirit of the queen of thrillers, but in an attempt to make it more modern and suitable for the spirit of the times, especially with respect to the most important film adaptations, those of the 70s. A balance that is certainly difficult to find when faced with a great classic, but if you want to see the glass half full, it is undeniable that this “Nile” succeeds where the “Orient-Express” was only partially successful, that is in the dosage between “Old” and “new”, between genre clichés (Christie is a genre in itself) and leaps forward.
On the one hand there is the heart of the novel and its intertwining, which is fully respected, in its mix between romanticism and cynicism, between thriller and melodrama against the exotic background of a fairy tale Egypt made up of sunsets, snakes, pyramids, sphinxes and whatever else serves to transform it into a deliberately gross fetish. Just as the archetypal and one-dimensional characters are all there: the rich heiress everyone hates, the fiery husband, the vengeful lover, and all the eccentric suspects, each with his motive and all ready to hide something, while the placid waters of the Nile are tinged with blood red, like in a watercolor for tourists. The mechanism of the crime, with its spiral of death that transforms the wedding idyll into a slaughter, is as usual as perfect as it is unrealistic, but if not restassism to the game, what classic thriller would it be? Beyond everything in this “Nile” there is however – compared to the “Orient-Express” – a greater openness of the directorial style, with movements, panoramas and dollies that give this second film what the first had denied it, or that wide and airy movement, impossible to obtain in the narrow cabins of the wagons of a train stuck in the snow.
The epicenter of the film is Branagh’s Poirot, very far from the abstract figure made only of thinking matter created by Christie. The little Belgian maniac has now lost its classic connotation (for that there is the television model of David Suchet), but he is a contemporary character, extremely iridescent and crossed by a thousand fractures, guilt and unresolved feelings, an angry man and sanguine, ready to accuse and to get justice, but also shy and hopelessly melancholy. It is inevitable that the film will end up resembling him, that is, a wandering figure, who from the early twentieth century comes to the present day as a sort of survivor, forced to measure himself no longer only with the crime, but with the great question of identity. . The real repressed of the age in which we live, the real great enigma to be solved.
Director: Kenneth Branagh; Performers: Kenneth Branagh, Gal Gadot, Armie Hammer, Emma Mackey, Annette Bening; Screenplay: Michael Green; Photography: Haris Zambarloukos; Music: Patrick Doyle; Editing: Úna Ní Dhonghaíle; Production Design: Jim Clay; Costumes: Paco Delgado. Distribution: Walt Disney. USA, 127 ‘, 2021.
In Florence he is in these rooms: Adriano, Marconi, Odeon, Portico, Principe, The Space, Uci.
11 February 2022 | 16:33
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