![]() ![]() And the creatures within! Colorful, trailing lacelike gossamer fins and languidly wavering lances and barbs, they often stare at you with huge goldfish eyes and make weak little gulping motions with their mouths.īehind stand fairy-tale castles and forests of kelp - though sometimes the water is so cloudy and full of disintegrating fish flakes you can’t be completely sure. Again the same narrow depth-of-field, but you also sense a thick pane of glass (the camera lens?) blocking your view. The scent of slowly browning newspaper and dessicated insects and mothballs, that’s the smell of a Wes Anderson film. ![]() You also sense the stale air of a diorama, especially in the later titles - the sense that these brittle figures were conceived in a studio, and are too fragile to be exposed to fresh air, or see the light of day (their colors would fade!). The people in his films - and you realize with a start that, yes, there are people in his films - often pose like diorama figures, staring straight at the camera with a helpless or resigned expression on their faces (in a way they evoke the films of Terence Davies, only Davies seems to want to suggest the yellowing photographs from an old family album, while Anderson is more interested in a stylized comedy). You notice the numerous miniatures, monomaniacally detailed (what, for example, looks like a funicular clambering up the cliff face), occasionally in motion (the ski-and-bobsled chase sequence, done in real time - when Jopling (Willem Dafoe) launches from the ski jump he flicks into the air like one of Mischa Auer’s circus fleas) you also see various sets and props that look as if they were miniatures, toylike representations of themselves (the gloriously chichi Mendl’s Bakery boxes, candy pink cardboard which with a pull of the ribbon assemble themselves into carrying cases, with a tug at the knot fall apart to reveal the pretty pastries inside). What’s a Wes Anderson film like? Describing one’s a task I find both easy and difficult - easy in that I can talk till the moon goes dim, difficult in that everyone else has taken a stab at it and practically everything insightful or original has already been committed to the printed (or digital) page.Īnderson’s films are like dioramas. As Critic After Dark Noel Vera says, short and sweet and - of course - not a little bitter. In The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), Wes Anderson serves up quite a dish, leaving an incredible taste. ![]()
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