2023-11-22 11:53:50
by Maurizio Porro
On Netflix four short works by the most snobbish and cultured director in American cinema
Wes Anderson is one of the most snobbish and cultured directors of American cinema outside the mainstream canons of fantasy and science fiction. He started years ago with a surprising debut, “The Tannenbaums” and continued with a series of titles of great elegance and imagination among which we like to remember “Grand Hotel Budapest”, while it was recently released in Italy with a lukewarm critical reception, his new “Asteroid city”. Meanwhile, four of his new “Shorts” have debuted on Netflix, one of 40 minutes and three of 17 (it is a series in the sense that the material belongs to the same fantasy) all inspired by the world of the very original fairy tales of Roald Dahl, the English writer who the American director who now lives between Paris and London had already been inspired by “Fantastic mr. Fox” and Dahl himself comes on stage every now and then to give clarifications.
Anderson is not an ideological director, but here he also makes some moral jabs and cares about the visual aspect of his works, the symmetries, the colors, the design, the light, so much so that all the material of his new film has been organized in a beautiful exhibition at the Prada Foundation in Milan. It’s a bit like the cinema counterpart of what Bob Wilson is in the theater with his shows so seductive to watch (and not only that). Anderson is enchanted by his talent in camera movements, in silences, in the emptiness of a desert, in recreating reality from unreality and vice versa, perhaps creating a catalog of memories about 1950s America and uniting in marriage the set, the TV and the stage as in “Asteroid city”. In the short films taken from Dahl’s fairy-tale “lessons”, there is instead the search for the particular, for the unique and original situation, for the grotesque paroxysm, for revealed tricks.
The longest film “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar” tells of a very rich swindler who finds the notes of an Indian man, a guru who could see without the use of his eyes and here he uses the trick to cheat at cards with a system without do it, becoming more and more powerful. In “Rat catcher” there is a Ralph Fiennes (also present in the other titles, Wes has his own stable company which includes Roman Coppola writing or photography) convinced that he has to become like one of the rats to defend himself: there it’s always a strange relationship between man and animal in Dahl’s stories. In “The swan”, the narrator Rupert Friend tells us about a child bullied by two older bullies.
When speaking, everyone looks into the camera, that is, they use a theatrical device, they address the audience, and this is the most heartbreaking film and not only because of the bad and predictable end that the swan ends up with. But the most slimy and dangerous animal is in “Poison”, where Benedict Cumberbatch, also a regular actor in the group, lies motionless in bed but thinks he has a snake under the covers that is about to bite him. Dev Patel and Ben Kingsley are at his side to help him and, even in 17 minutes, the story in unity of time, place and action twists several times reaching the most absolute paranoia. The reading experience is conveyed by the director with the lines spoken directly towards us as if we were not spectators but readers of a fairy tale, perhaps children waiting for goodnight.
Each film has an evocative and illustrative power, it has beautiful figures as a child would say, it is beautiful to look at and the sets could be made of cardboard, like in a children’s theater, they move and move together. Dahl, famous for Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, twice brought to the cinema, and for “Matilda”, still a wonderful film and musical, finds with Anderson an ideal place that lies between puppets, fairy tales and a cinema in which camera movements intertwine to create a colorful and very precise expressive system in the relationship between spaces, objects and people, landscapes and interiors, without completely eliminating even with a few glances a little moral lesson.
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November 22, 2023 (modified November 22, 2023 | 10:53)
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