Wes Anderson’s Nietzschian Perfect Cinema as an Infinite Clear Line

In order to Nietzsche It was hard to discover that much of what he had been told about the Greeks was not entirely true. One thinks of ancient Greece and it comes to mind, in addition to the beaches, that endeavor for the transcendent intellectualism that emerged from Socrates. Plato’s teacher was a man devoted to the grave, to the serious, to what lives behind the shadows and hides at the bottom of caves. And one might think with it that all the residents then in the Peloponnese and neighboring islands were like that. And no. Actually, as the German of Dionysian tendencies soon realized, the Greeks really cared about the surface, the fold, the touch of the epidermis. “They adored appearances, they believe in forms, in sounds, in words”, Nietzsche writes for that way vindicate for thought and life the art of the superficial and even of the frivolous.

Wes Anderson, who discovered himself in Cannes on Monday with his latest and much-anticipated achievement, has been pestering sequence-shot semiologists for years and giving marveling moralists something to talk about. And he does it with a cinema proud of its superficiality, happy in its geometric arrangement of gestures, landscapes and pastel colors. It is not that the American born in Houston is just a posh eccentric (which too), it is also that he is also one with a conviction, a taste for detail and a balanced disposition of emotion that, in truth, is not noticeable. His is a stubbornly humanistic universe in which the characters act by an essentially beautiful principle of righteousness. His is a warm world where the cool arrangement of spaces always caters to an intuition with grace. Not necessarily ironic. His is a polite cosmos and fierce in its ethical demands on any aesthetic fickleness (or the other way around). His devotion to so-called frivolity is, if you will, of character ‘Nietzschean‘; it is the way that his cinema gives itself to discuss the cinfila, stale and heteropatriarchal imposture of the given. Always against the grave and waxy voice of the one who knows.

His new film, which comes with a delay of more than a year (it was selected right here in 2020), is exactly what Wes Anderson’s cinema has always been, but this time it has become an archetype. It will be said that in ‘The French Chronicle’ (This is how the ‘The French Dispatch‘original), the director has decided to give reason to his critics to elaborate a film conscious of being a Wes Anderson film beyond what Wes Anderson himself ever imagined. As it is. The stories are folded into stories while the living pictures of infinite characters trapped in their hands pass in continuous acceleration across the screen. Each scene, as if it were a vignette by Edgar P. Jacobs, rather than Herg, is full of a thousand perfect and small details destined to be discovered again and again. The superficial thing is, we have arrived, the bottom; frivolity is the way to disarm the always slightly fallacious impulse of the transcendent.

–

The closure due to death of a magazine in the imaginary French city of Ennui-sur-Blas (Villahasto de la Desgana) is recounted. Up there, a rich heir (Bill Murray) He came back some time with the lunatic intention of telling everything. And do it in writing in a “weekly analysis of international politics, the arts (beautiful and not beautiful) and other diverse and varied events.” Section by section, the film narrates a travel report on the bicycle of Owen Wilson; a history of the greatest of painters by the hand of Tilda Swinton; a youthful and political chronicle with Frances McDormand as a conscientious analyst, and a gastronomic police adventure (it is so) thanks to the good palate and sense of risk of Jeffrey Wright. In the middle, Benicio, the bull (the painter), Léa Seydoux (the muse of the previous one), Adrien Brody (the art dealer with vision), Timothe Chalamet (the young revolutionary), Mathieu Amalric (the food-loving detective), Edward Norton (the day-hungry kidnapper) …

If the aforementioned actors are added to the sets of Stphane Cressend, the wardrobe of Milena Canonero and the music of Alexandre Desplat it is possible to speak that ‘The French Chronicle’ is a kind of summary of the corpus’andersoniano‘which also wants to be a celebration of the cinema itself. And even journalism. Each of the tales forks into a thousand others in an incessant provocation of images that function as the vocabulary of a secret language and search words, each one of its own color. At one point, everything transforms into an animated tale that makes the dream of so many of seeing the adventures of Blake and Mortimer in motion come true.

If you will, this is a tribute to French culture through the most curious eyes of the best of American culture. In fact, the film covers each and every one of the topics (or archetypes) between 1950 and 1970 that have shaped a way of seeing the world to which neither the cinema of Jacques Tati or Carn or Truffaut nor the tour nor ‘The Chinese’. All drawn and filmed in an infinite clear line.

In Anderson’s last film, ‘Isle of dogs’, inspired by the novel by Richard Adams The hunted dogs‘, one of the dogs complained to another about the difficulty of being a wild animal. The problem, the friend replies, is that according to what you have to start first. Too long trained, too long conscious of the virtue of order. Something similar happens to the protagonists of Wes Anderson’s cinema, to all of them. It is difficult for them to abstract from their condition as enigmatic and immaculately perfect beings. They want to be just human beings, but they are late. The very nature of cinema has made them what they are: the most faithful, detailed, fun, and even cruel representation of any of us.

And I know, indeed, it is the miracle. Since ‘Bottle Rockett‘to peaks of timeless and Cartesian melodrama as ‘Trip to Darjeeling‘ O ‘El Gran Hotel Budapest ‘ Until arriving here as an exaltation of all the above, Anderson’s camera moves across the screen like the pencil that drew Tintin: with the same transparency and obstinacy. It is about teaching the existential adventure of its characters from the meticulous description of what surrounds them and makes them what they are. The idea is none other than to paint what’s inside from the outside. And in this game of exciting landscapes, of passionate geometries, what is important is what is seen, the shape, the superficial, even the frivolous. Everything that is taught could have been much more natural or wild, but for that, as the dog and even Nietzsche know, one must have been born earlier.

FROM RUSSIA WITH … HATE

For the rest, the official section offered ‘Petrov’s Flu‘(Petrov’s Flu) by Kirill Serebrennikov, perhaps with the aim of compensating for so much happy reflection on an unreal France. The director of the vibrant, ambitious and desperate musical ‘SUMMER‘(2018) now wants to tell what is happening in his country at the current date. And since in doing so it seems that he cannot find the right words for the enormity of the company, he can think of nothing better than offering himself in sacrifice.

Suddenly, the screen is drenched in the hallucinated despair of the director himself (persecuted as a homosexual by Putin) and what he is able to see is a violent world that struggles not to fall apart. Post-Soviet Russia is transformed into a nightmare contemplated by the enormous fever of an eternal flu. Serebrennikov says that with this film he tried to express what Russia represents for him and those who are like him. “I wanted to share our childhood memories and tell the public what we like, what we hate; I wanted to share our loneliness and our hopes.”

The result is an exercise in visceral and drugged cinema that does not renounce anything: the vampire genre is mixed with the hallucinated dramatization of dreams that cannot be more than nightmares, and the memories function as wounds in the story of a man who drags his flu for an endless night. Brutal and hopeless. All that is light in Anderson is only shadow here.