Asteroid City

Wes Anderson: Asteroid City (US 2023).

Wes Anderson: Asteroid City (US 2023). Scarlett Johansson in Zelda Zonk mode. A Focus Features release. Courtesy of Pop. 87 Productions / Focus Features. Please do click on the photo to enlarge it.

Asteroid City / Asteroid City.
    US © 2023 Pop. 87 Productions LLC & Focus Features LLC. Focus Features and Indian Paintbrush present an American Empirical Picture. P: Wes Anderson, Steven Rales, Jeremy Dawson.
    D: Wes Anderson. SC: Wes Anderson – story by Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola. DP:  Robert D. Yeoman – photographed on Kodak Film with the Arriflex Camera System, color by Company 3 – in black and white and colour  – in Academy and Scope. PD: Adam Stockhausen. AD: Stéphane Cressend. Set dec: Kris Moran. Cost: Milena Canonero. Make-up and hair design: Julie Dartnell. SFX: Pau Costa. VFX: Gorilla VFX, Vast, Jellyfish Pictures, Goodbye Kansas, Red Visual Effects, Misc Studios. M: Alexandre Desplat. S: Wayne Lemmer. ED: Barney Pilling. Casting: Douglas Aibel. CAST:

    Jason Schwartzman as Augie Steenbeck,
Scarlett Johansson as Midge Campbell,
Tom Hanks as Stanley Zak,
Jeffrey Wright as General Gibson,
Tilda Swinton as Dr. Hickenlooper,
Bryan Cranston as The Host,
Edward Norton as Conrad Earp,
Adrien Brody as Schubert Green,
Liev Schreiber as J. J. Kellogg,
Hope Davis as Sandy Borden,
Stephen Park as Roger Cho,
Rupert Friend as Montana,
Maya Hawke as June Douglas,
Steve Carell as the motel manager,
Matt Dillon as the mechanic,
Hong Chau as Polly,
Willem Dafoe as Saltzburg Keitel,
Margot Robbie as the actress / wife,
Tony Revolori as the aide-de-camp,
Jake Ryan as Woodrow,
Grace Edwards as Dinah,
Aristou Meehan as Clifford,
Sophia Lillis as Shelly,
Ethan Josh Lee as Ricky,
Jeff Goldblum as the Alien.
    Film shot in Chinchón, Colmenar de Oreja, Aranjuez y Valdelaguna (Comunidad de Madrid), Spain.
    104 min
    Festival premiere: 23 May 2023 Cannes Film Festival.
    US premiere: 13 June 2023 (limited).
    US premiere: 23 June 2023 (wide).
    Finnish premiere: 9 June 2023, released by Finnkino, Finnish / Swedish subtitles by Janne Mökkönen / Frej Grönholm.
    Viewed at Finnkino Strand 4, Iso Kristiina, Lappeenranta, 9 June 2023.

IMDb synopsis: " The itinerary of a Junior Stargazer convention is spectacularly disrupted by world-changing events. "

AA: INITIAL MUSINGS AROUND A MASTERPIECE.

Wes Anderson is at his best in Asteroid City. It is also one of the best films of the year and among the best of the decade.

André Bazin divided film-makers into those who believe in realíty and those who believe in the image. Wes Anderson is a master in the latter group, sharing the honour with contemporaries such as Roy Andersson (no relation). (Wes Anderson did not start this way, as can be seen in Bottle Rocket).

Wes Anderson has a carefully cultivated style, totally artificial in many ways, and sometimes close to what Susan Sontag called "camp", but with a different electric current, a complexity and sensibility of his own.

Set in the year 1955 in a tiny Southwest desert town, Asteroid City is a retro-futuristic adventure like The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. The Jacques-Yves Cousteau parody took us beneath the sea. In Asteroid City we are looking at the sky in a Junior Stargazer convention.

Like Robert Altman and Woody Allen, Wes Anderson is a wizard of the all star cast, able to engage major stars even into bit parts. The ubiquitous Bill Murray has been replaced this time by Tom Hanks, playing the cantankerous grandfather.

Asteroid City is not a genre film, but besides science fiction, I mostly find it a comedy. In a very general sense this kind of comedy belongs to the Buster Keaton tradition. It deals with colossal issues including death, nuclear peril and alien invasion. A major source of comedy is a deadpan attitude, registering the overwhelming with understatement.

Another source of comedy is formality: symmetry, frontality, and multiple framing meta-levels that are smoothly accessible despite their complexity. I was smiling from the beginning, and I believe that the whole audience was having fun in a special, Wes Anderson kind of way. He won our sympathy instantly.

For a fleeting while I was thinking about Nope, which shares some of the premises of Asteroid City, yielding quite different results.

A sympathetic feature in Asteroid City is that the dramatis personae include several generations, including children and the young. One of the expressions that come to mind in Anderson's films is "naivism" which in his case is also a defiant, unpatronizing empathy with a childish perspective. Like in Moonrise Kingdom, Anderson pays respect to tender and awkward truths of young and sincere love.

A passion in animation belongs to Wes Anderson's distinctive features, in films such as Fantastic Mr. Fox. In Asteroid City, animated figures include the Alien (modelled after Jeff Goldblum) and a Roadrunner (in Finnish: juoksukäki), not to be mixed with the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes / Merrie Melodies character. 

Anderson belongs to the film-makers who prefer photochemical film, although we are deep in the digital era. In Moonrise Kingdom the reward was a warm and tender hue.

The colour world of Asteroid City is unique and hard to pin down. Ever since the release of the trailer, there has been wide debate and admiration for Wes Anderson's palette, which is also already being simulated.

The word "pastel" has been mentioned, and why not, but pastel painting is a wide tradition, and I have happened to pay special attention to it this year at Musée d'Orsay, its Manet / Degas exhibition and the Albert Edelfelt exhibition. Perhaps a certain kind of pastel has affinities, but I don't find the pastel description convincing in general.

"Low contrast" comes to mind, but it is not accurate, the imagery cannot be defined in the "low contrast" / "high contrast" register. It is something stranger, about the middle ground being more even and flat than usual. The imagery is at once bright and dull in a special combination. At once colourful and subtly blurred. A special event is the "full frontal" shot where we see everything and nothing, of a stunt double to boot. The imagery evokes old, slightly faded colour magazines or picture postcards. And obsolete colour film systems from the 1920s and the 1940s (Thomsoncolor? Rouxcolor?).

Perhaps this colour world will be called "Asteroid City Color".

ZELDA ZONK

There would be a lot to say. Personally, I was moved by one of the movie's subtexts (it is discussed in the film's press book, so this is not just my imagination): Marilyn Monroe.

Asteroid City is a dream play about the baby boom age, the space age, the early nuclear age and the sex bomb age. It was still the period of the cinema's greatest love goddesses and fertility symbols. Marilyn Monroe was one of the last female superstars of the classical Hollywood studio system. In The Misfits she managed to reach out towards the new space of the cinema of modern alienation.

Major stars have channelled their Marilyn Monroe passion, including Ashley Judd and Mira Sorvino, not forgetting Michelle Williams, Jessica Lange and Michelle Pfeiffer. This time it's Scarlett Johansson conveying her inner Marilyn Monroe in a delicate yet frank fashion.

There are many affinities and references: the year 1955, the superstar's meticulous care with photographs, Actors Studio, the marriage with a major playwright, the aspiration to serious drama, Bus Stop, the desert (like in The Misfits), the nuclear tests (Robert Kennedy combined Marilyn Monroe and nuclear tests in his weekend agenda in California).

The family story and the new love affair in Asteroid City are Jewish. MM converted to Judaism when she married Arthur Miller, and although she was an atheist, her connection with the Jewish people and the Miller family was heartfelt and profound. Her films were banned in Egypt during her marriage with Miller.

The black hair on the blonde: all through the 1950s MM donned a black wig when incognito, registered as "Zelda Zonk", and also did a major photo session as a brunette. Most importantly, the joy of life, the absence of taboos, the life-affirming presence of children.

One of the popular books of the era was Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death. That is the question also in Wes Anderson's lovely movie.