Branagh gets closer to Poirot's haunted heart.

 

 

Last night I watched  Kenneth Branagh’s 2023 Poirot movie, A Haunting In Venice.  

I thought it was an interesting step away from the big budget, heavily star-laden extravaganzas of his last two Poirots, with a very limited location, almost all of it shot inside a Venetian Palazzo, but with Venice still in view enough for locations to be identified and enjoyed.   

It has an interesting, if less expensive, cast: Jamie Dornan and the remarkable young Jude Hill play father and son again as they did in Branagh’s Belfast, but offering us very different characters; Michelle Yeoh gives us some rather pleasing scenery-chewing as the medium Joyce Reynolds; Tina Fey steps back 60 years into a 14’s screwball comedy persona as the Agatha Christie stand-in, Ariadne Oliver, the writer whose fortune is based on fictionalising Poirot’s cases and Camile Cottin, who I last watched with much pleasure in ‘Call My Agent’ is there along with some British actors I did not really know, such as Kyle Allen, Ali Khan and Emma Laird.    

Branagh used his favourite cinematographer, Haris Zambarloukos, who shot his previous Poirots, plus Cinderella and Belfast, and who has recently filmed Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.   In A Haunting Zambarloukos used discombobulating ‘Dutch Angles’ and unusual POVs, which alongside Hildur Guonadottir’s queasy score (Joker and Magdalene both benefited from her contributions), and the editing of Lucy Donaldson, heighten the weirdness of what is essentially a Cert 12 family horror movie.  

One of the benefits of watching this on DVD that I was able to replay one shot frame by frame and see something I had almost missed on first sight.   Although throughout the story Poirot is determined to debunk any supernatural explanations, and solves a number of murders by doing so, these few frames towards the end do raise a question about the supernatural that is not addressed or answered.      

Typically it A Haunting divided critics, some claiming it to the best of Branagh’s Poirots, others saying it was the worst.   I thought that the smaller scale suited Agatha Christie’s actual literary importance.  This is not an adaptation of War and Peace, The English Patient, David Copperfield or Cloud Atlas. It is light entertainment, but it really does entertain.  When Branagh makes a film he always uses the best talent available.   Some Producers/Directors ‘show us the money’ on the screen;  Branagh shows the talent. Michael Green, as an example, wrote both Logan and Blade Runner 2049.   

I do not know the original novel, Hallowe’en Party, set in the `Home Counties’, nor its chronological place in the saga, but I thought Branagh and the scriptwriter with whom he created all the Poirot movies have now established an arc that is deepening and darkening Poirot’s story, especially showing the effect of the two World Wars and the loss of his late wife, Katherine.  In A Haunting Joyce the medium exclaims her name when in a (supposed) trance.  Some may remember that the story of Katherine and Poirot was told in Branagh’s Death on the Nile, and the heaviness of so much death obviously hangs heavily on his shoulders and heart.  That is why he had given up his detective work at the beginning of the film and retired to Venice.   

I hope that this movie will continue his career in this less spectacular but more personal tone.  

Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk surprised me. Well It would, wouldn't it?

 War movies can overwhelm us with excitement,  shock us with violence, rouse us with heroism.   There is plenty of excitement In Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk, and shock and heroism, but as the context is different it needs to be portrayed differently.    This is not. film about a battle, but about the retreat of the British Expeditionary Force from France in 1940.   The British politicians an military has under-estimated their enemies power and their defeat could have ended with the annihilation of 300,000 British and French troops  on the beaches.   Instead the British civilians rose to the occasion and saved the vats majority them.      

The first scene shows us a ‘Tommy’ under fire running for his life through the village of Dunkirk.   Tommy is his name, and also the generic for British foot soldiers.    He shows no heroics here, just the determination to escape, to survive.     On the beach he sees a young Frenchman dressing himself in a British casualty’s uniform and taking his dog tag.   The dead man was called Gibson.   He also wants to survive.   Wordlessly, Tommy wordlessly.     Then we see thousands of soldiers on the beach also waiting to be saved.    They stands in orderly lines.   They maintain their discipline.  This stoicism is a kind of heroism.  For our Tommy it is day One.    

We see Mr. Dawson and his son about to sail their ‘little boat’ across the Channel from the south coast ofEngland to help save them.    Why do they need to go?  Because the British Military know that the Expeditionary Force has lost its battle and to commit the Navy’s ships to save them would  mean losing more fighting boats,  and then a Nazi invasion of Britain would not, could not,  be stopped.     Plus the fact that only shallow draft  boats could ferry the troops from the beach.  These little boats were their only hope.    Mr. Dawson tells his son that ‘as old men started this war they should do something to save the young men from dying in it’.     The Dawsons are joined by 17 year old George,  an ‘under-achiever’ who simply wants to achieve something, to be useful.     None of them know  what they will face.   This is another kind of heroism.   For them it is a day-long voyage.

    

In the air three Spitfire pilots  take on the German Stukas and Heinkels that intend to strafe and bomb the soldiers on the beach and the boats trying to rescue them.   This is old fashioned fighting, jousting in the air,  the kind we are accustomed too.  But these pilots are not filmed the way we are used to.     They have no names, we hardly see their faces.  We get no back-stories, no personal contexts for them.  They are simply men fighting in the air.   Two of them are shot down.   We know that one of them survives, just.   The third is soon faced with a problem.   He is running out of fuel but the enemy planes are still there.  Should he cut and run, go back, refuel and then engage the enemy once more?   Of should he stick to his task, bring down the remaining Heinkel to save the lives its bombs would have taken – and put his own life at even greater risk.   There are no radio conversation here, he does not discuss his options with his ground base.    We simply see his decision in his eyes and in his actions.  His story is less than an hour long, and it too is heroic.

On the ground, and in the past (each element of earth, sea and air is in its own time frame;  a week, a day and an hour, eventually coming together in the film’s final scenes) Tommy cannot find his own regiment and is doing whatever he can to get off the deadly beach.   A party of stretcher carriers has been wiped out by a bomb,  but a casualty on a stretcher is still alive.   Tommy picks up the stretcher, aided by ‘Gibson’  and run they for the Mole, the jetty where the only naval ship is taking on the wounded - and their bearers.    Day after day, night after night  Tommy and the Frenchman do what they have to in order to survive – but they do not do so at the cost of others.   They do not succumb to paranoia or xenophobia – unlike some of their companions.     Our Tommy never fights anyone.  He never sacrifices himself, he just gets on with the job of staying alive.   He will live to fight another day.

Back on the beach  the Naval Commander  overseeing the evacuation is trying to make the best out of bad job.   He knows the harsh realities of the situation and  simply gets on with his task too.  Later,  when some think he has discharged his duty he knows there is still more to do.  He does not leave the beachhead.   Another quiet, undemonstrative hero.  

The enemy soldiers are never seen.   There is no jingoism, and even Churchill’s famous Parliamentary  speech (we will fight them on the beaches) is simply read aloud by a soldier from a newspaper.   

In one shot we see a crowd of soldiers on the beach with their eyes downcast – only ‘our’ Tommy is looking up, only his face is clear.  These heroes are emblematic;  the ‘Tommy’; the Civilian sailor; the Fighter Pilot;  the Naval Officer.     They are not personalized.  We know nothing about them apart from what they do on screen.    

Many of these parts are not played by well known actors.     Fionn Whitehead as Tommy is a newcomer.   So are most of his  fellows.  Harry Styles is a pop singer but he has not acted before.   It is true that Mr. Dawson is played by Mark Rylance, well known to theatre goers and those who followed him as Thomas Cromwell in the BBC’s Wolf Hall.  He was given an Oscar for his part in The Bridge of Spies, and was the motion capture BFG, but his 'film' star is still rising.     Tom Hardy  is Farrier, one of the pilots,  and he is a big star, but here he has no opportunity for grandstand acting, his face is largely hidden and voice  distorted by his flying helmet’s mask.   Kenneth Branagh is the Beach Commander,  but his main role is to be still and make unvoiced decisions.     Cillian Murphy plays a shell-shocked  Lieutenant picked up by Dawson mid-channel from the hull of a stricken ship.  He also has very little to say.    Nobody chews the scenery.  There may not be any acting Oscars up for grabs here, but these characters  are not cyphers.    They may be pawns, knights, bishops and kings on the strategic and dramatic chess board,  as Matthew Lickona of the San Diego Reader has observed,  but they all earn our sympathy.    It is as if Nolan has taken a number of different  but representational microscope slides of this truly epic event and offered them too us.     (I liked the way that the ‘secondary actors name came up first in the credits, followed by those of the ‘stars’,)

So was I underwhelmed?   Yes, but properly so.   This is a different kind of war film, neither epic – despite its scope – nor  personal.  It is not bloody – it is certainly not Saving Private Ryan -  but the deaths count.   It puts an epic event under a microscope to let us see the human details, but with no melodrama.   

It inhabits three elements, land, sea and air, each with its own tempo and timescale,  and blends them together - with the aid of Hans Zimmer’s pulsating score and Hoygte van Hoytema’s amazing cinemaphotography – into a symphony.    Zimmer’s music often ratchets up the tension,  but are also times for appropriate quietness.     How Hoytema  managed to get footage shot on bulky IMAX 70mm film cameras into a cockpit and under water as if they were hand help is amazing.     I have not (yet) seen the film on IMAX, but I will,  it was made for that format and as the telling of the tale is so immersive it deserves to be seen on the largest possible screen.    

Is it perfect?  Of course not.  No work of art can be.   Even though there is no ‘mansplaining’ some of the script may be avoidably expositional.   Some of the sentiments are a little platitudinous, even if given authenticity  in Mark Rylance mouth.    The three time scales can lead to confusion (it took me a while to see that they are not presented simultaneously, so daylight scenes are interleaved with night-time events, which confused me).       I was surprised when Tommy, who lost his rifle in the first scene, did not pick up a weapon abandoned by the dead on the beach.   A soldier without a weapon is an oxymoron, and I am sure any squaddie  is his position would have collected one, even if a few minutes later he passed himself off as an unarmed stretcher bearer.      The score, which is mainly brilliant, does not need to reference the Nimrod Variation in the final scene.        Should Nolan have made room for a little humour – even the dark humour fighting men use to defend themselves from the horror?   Yes, he could.  The nearest we get is when one of the pilots is rescued and greets his rescuer with a curt ‘afternoon’, and I don’t think the mood would have been punctured by the odd laugh. 

The 1958 movie Dunkirk, directed by Leslie Norman (Barry Norman’s father) and starring John Mills and Dickie Attenborough also followed a few characters, but has a much more complex plot.      I was surprised by how lean Nolan’s film was, and how short.  At 107 minutes it is the shortest since his first, and maybe his most humane.   It ends with an individuals  surrender, but that is simply the cost of him doing his duty.   Nolan has done his duty, honouring this epic defeat and making it a human victory.   It was a retreat that allowed the Allies to eventually win the war.