2023-09-30 08:40:38
ASTEROID CITY. In the rooms
Wes Anderson’s aesthetic is like a gentle sea in which it is pleasant to get lost. For admirers, Wes is Fellini’s true heir. «His imagination is limitless». For his detractors, his films are only well-conceived exercises in style: bizarre colours, logical disconnects, bizarre layouts, a fusion of stories that are often unrelated and inadmissible. Geniuses divide. Anderson has a multimedia, poetic-surreal, Ariosto-esque touch. But lately he’s struggling to keep up. He seeks formal perfection and often seems not to take the public into account.
He is an author who enjoys displacing and removing points of reference. The criticisms are abounding, but the expressive power of the director from Houston, born in 1969, with an advertising father and an archaeologist mother, is not in question. As well as his ability to catalyze the interest of the most popular actors, even willing to pay union wages and secondary parts to have access to a film directed by the director of The Royal Family (2001), Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), The French Dispatch ( 2021). This is professional adoration, just like it used to be for Woody Allen.
The distribution logic of his works is also curious: in the same stretch of the season, alongside Asteroid City, premiered at Cannes 2023, the medium-length film The Marvelous Story of Henry Sugar is also scheduled with the Netflix label, in an ideal twinning between cinema and streaming (we talk about it below). WA’s activity is also on display in Milan until January 7th thanks to the Prada Foundation.
Cinema in the theatre, theater in the cinema, and then there is noisy and irritating television. Asteroid City is spectacular current affairs sublimated in an imaginative multiverse that has no equals in the current panorama. The American dream implodes, everyone (the characters) goes in search of a meaning to add to their existence. The Chinese box game, as we know, is Anderson’s favourite. Which opens his film in insinuating black and white. A TV host talks about a play in New York that inspires a pastel-colored film set circa 1955 in a fictional American town in the New Mexico desert. The town is known as Asteroid City. An astronomy conference, known as Junior Stargazer, takes place there. But why is the town called Asteroid City? Because in that dusty and remote place thousands of years earlier a meteorite fell and a monumental crater opened on impact. In the background there are the nuclear explosions at the nearby Los Alamos base, the US military garrison transformed into a top secret laboratory / reception center for aliens, whose fame was relaunched by the blockbuster of the summer, Oppenheimer by Christopher Nolan, dedicated to the father of the atomic bomb, physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer.
The Asteroid City convention attracts scholars and students with moms and dads ready to participate in the competition. At this point, having laid the premises and arranged his pawns, Anderson loosens the reins of the horses and lets his stories gallop, overlapping them, deforming them, integrating them. The fresco has an antique flavor. It recalls the old comedies and dramas of the 1950s, the golden age of Broadway and the Actors Studio. Anderson says: «I was thinking of actors like Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, playwrights like Sam Shepard and Arthur Miller. While shooting in the desert, I was thinking of westerns in Cinemascope. The beauty of the film lies precisely in the nostalgia for this period of American history, when directors like Elia Kazan and actors like Marlon Brando and James Dean changed the style of acting.”
Therefore, a praise of times gone by and the stars who were their symbol. Reality and above all fiction are intertwined. The actors become storytellers of a secular representation in which there are those who try to escape, those who shake themselves in the face of surprising events and those who question everything while waiting for the big bang. The film is also a family reunion: starring Jason Schwartzman, Anderson’s fetish actor (seventh film together), as well as co-written with Roman Coppola, son of Francis Ford Coppola and Schwartzman’s cousin as the son of Talia Shire (Rocky’s «Adrianaaaaa!») who is Francis Ford’s sister. The actors section is as crowded as a supermarket checkout at rush hour. Some don’t even appear in the credits. The best of the lot is Scarlett Johansson, the diva in crisis who becomes a work of art.
ASTEROID CITY di Wes Anderson
(Usa, 2023, durata 105’ Universal Pictures)
con Scarlett Johansson, Jason Schwartzman, Tom Hanks, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Maya Thurman-Hawke, Jeffrey Wright
Rating: *** ½ out of 5
In the rooms
September 30, 2023 | 08:39
(©) ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
#Wes #Anderson #Asteroid #Years #Eve #Polanski #Talk #thriller #afterlife #films #cinema #streaming