A famous playwright brings to the stage his play, Asteroid City, set in a small town lost in the desert between California and Arizona. Here the lives of a war photographer and his children, a movie diva, a schoolteacher, a cowboy and other small humanity who will witness an exceptional event intertwine. But where does fiction end and reality begin?
Wes Anderson returns to competition at Cannes Film Festival
The third time after Moonrise Kingdom and The French Dispatch, with a new piece of his fictional universe of many characters connected by invisible existential threads. The as-always vibrant cast moves this time in a meta-cine-theatrical tale in which the events unfolding on the screen are the pretext for an exercise in style between Brecht and Pirandello.
Everything one expects from the cinema of the director of The Tenenbaums is there, from the unfailing perfection of framing to the colour palette with which he paints his stories. What has begun to be lacking, however, for some films now, is a natural substance to the narrative, which is increasingly fragmented, drowned in the many, too many words, and by the as many characters, many of whom are hardly functional to the economy of the staging.
Anderson, however, seems to have been searching for something else for some time, along with his lifelong writing partner, Roman Coppola. There is an evident desire to search for a new form in which reality and fantasy can continually trespass into each other’s backyards. It is an almost psychoanalytic process, a constant need to ask questions about the very function of the narrator, which, however, ends up emptying the narrative itself.
It is a choice to which the Anderson gang, composed here of a dream team that includes Scarlett Johansson, Jason Schwartzman, Tom Hanks, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Tilda Swinton, Liev Schreiber, Bryan Cranston, Steve Carrell, Margot Robbie, Maya Hawke, Rupert Friend, and Jeffrey Wright, adheres without questioning anything.
Sadly, that magic that reinvented the great choral cinema of the New Hollywood of the 1970s is no longer there; it has given way to an auteur narcissism that questions the very relationship with the audience, which has this vision one must abandon at risk instead of leaving it.