Last Train to Christmas – Michael Sheen adds sparkle to Sliding Doors | Movie theater

IIs there still a name for the kind of stories in which a character goes through multiple realities, which become magically accessible without any proper science fiction explanation, in order to learn a life lesson? Let’s call them mystical multifaceted tales. It’s a very popular plot mechanism in movies these days, though you can find it in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and then through Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, Groundhog Day, Sliding Doors and more.

This British comedy-drama is perfectly integrated into the mystical tradition of the multiverse, with its flawed but essentially sympathetic central character – in this case Michael Sean-born Tony Towers, who gave birth to Nottingham, who discovers that it can be a Christmas Eve. live the paths that his life could cross. have passed from one wagon to another on a train bound for home. The story begins in 1985, when Tony is a forty-year-old nightclub owner with a huge Peter Stringfellow-type blonde. On the return journey he is accompanied to see his elderly parents by his beautiful girlfriend Sue (Nathalie Emmanuel) and Roger’s younger brother (Cary Elwes with serious ginger wigs), who is less successful than Tony but is at least happily married. with Astrid (Anna Lundberg).

But when Tony gets in the next car, suddenly his clothes and hairstyle change and he no longer has the train ticket in his wallet. He makes small decisions, wants to open a club rather than six and give Roger a bigger stake in the joint venture. when he moves to another train car everything changes again. Sometimes we go deep into the past and see the characters played by younger actors and learn about the childhood traumas and the events that shaped them. In the end we arrive with Tony in our present age, older and probably wiser.

It’s a very high idea put forward by writer-director Julian Kemp, which has become even more bizarre than the way Sheen Tony just manages it all, quickly working out how to experiment with his future in order to either benefit himself or to save his loved ones from disaster. . But Sheen is an attractive enough actor to do it, murmuring and mocking not to get upset by the procession of well-observed, expensive but ridiculous costumes of the time, from the sharp Tony Wilson-type suit. shirt, in blazer in the color of caramel thread.

And then, slowly, it brings a tender sadness to the story, full of sad regrets and zen resignation to the unexpected of fate. The supports are also due to the production design team, which supplied all the different carpet upholstery fabrics for the train seats that mark different eras as the story unfolds.