Asteroid City shows that Wes Anderson’s cinema never looks as good as it does when it’s simple

We saw City of Asteroids AND he let us down. Nothing serious so far… The problemis that the film also gave birth to aa worry Ref the direction that Wes Anderson’s filmography is taking.

And if, after 11 feature films, the director he had become a prisoner of his own aesthetics ? If he has now moved away from simple, funny and touching characters in favor of too intellectualized works where hundreds of stars multiply cameos? What if Wes Anderson is no longer an accessible and popular director?

Asteroid City rhymes with boredom

City of Asteroids is located in a fictional American city in the middle of the desert. In 1955, the village held an awards ceremony which also brought together students and parents from all over the country for academic competitions…

However, this meeting of little geniuses whose inventions are all more revolutionary than the others changes nothing: boredom reigns in Asteroid City.

Even the sudden arrival of a extraterrestrial it won’t be enough to break torpor, melancholy that reigns in the city. Impossible not to see an echo between this territory where the dusty, barren land stretches as far as the eye can see without any horizon being distinguished AND the lives of these characters who go in circles, with dry hearts. Despite their diversity, they seem incapable of experiencing anything, if not an impossibility to have fun, to communicate, to get out of the malaise that reigns and infects everyone.

Asteroid City had everything to be a masterpiece

City of Asteroids it had everything to be a great film.

Beyond his brilliant actors and sumptuous image, Wes Anderson could have signed a moving work boredom, about mourning, about the difficulty of finding meaning to existence in our infinite, unfathomable and easily terrifying universe.

Among the young geniuses participating in the scientific competition, one keeps challenging oneself, as when jumping off a roof or trying to climb a cactus. When we ask him why he gives himself these challenges as absurd as it is dangerousthe young man replies with tears in his eyes and shortness of breath that it is a way for him to be active, to leave trace and to stand out in this existence to which it is hard to find meaning. Asteroid City could very well be the gathering place for geniuses, scholars, those who are most likely to understand the secrets of the universe, anxiety does not spare them.

In the movie, we see regularly atomic test mushroomswhile the Jason Schwartzman’s character has a scar left by a shell behind the skull. Also, throughout the film, the latter tries to tell his children that their mother is dead. Real wax dolls, the characters move and express themselves in an incredibly neutral and rigid way. they embody a kind of state of anesthesia generalized. It is as if this coldness is the only way to live in the midst of completely unfathomable worldwhere the omnipresence of violence and death.

Wes Anderson: an insecure director?

Thus, Wes Anderson had also found in this territory desert that unusual, as distressing as it is fun a territory of cinema perfect for evoking this collective existential crisis. Unfortunately, everything suggests that the director he didn’t have enough faith in his film. Instead of focusing on this rich drama and film material, the director drowns it in the midst of a cacophony of too intellectualizing formal elements, and frankly difficult to follow.

Thus, the film is built alternative modification between scenes in the city and black and white sequences, where a comedy is written. We see important players like Edward Norton, Bryan Cranston, Adrian Brody or Willem Dafoe. But their characters have neither the time nor the space to exist, so their scenes are almost limited to mere cameos. The film is also cut in action. However, it is difficult to immerse yourself in the history of the characters when the cards come to remind us every quarter of an hour that this is all a farce… As if we didn’t already know.

Indeed: this parallel with theater and this obsession with the mise en abyme were they really necessary? Wes Anderson’s aesthetic, his taste for strangewhich means you never really know if you’re faced with real actors OR dolls filmed in stop-motion on a model already induced a sense of artificiality in front of the show that is unfolding before our eyes… Which made it even more powerful, tragic and moving.

But diluting the story of Asteroid City in this complicated narrative structure, the director seems to have a lot of taste for metaphors “meta and incomprehensible auteur cinema”. We can only be sorry. Because, beyond his extraordinary aesthetics, Wes Anderson’s strength lies above all in his ability to do see, imagine and love characters from outcasts, who however bizarre and unusual they may be, always mark us with their own their way of being funnysincere and touching. And that, Wes Anderson need not be ashamed. We love it as it is.

Do you like our articles? You will love our newsletters! Sign up for free on this page.