In Hollywood, where assembly line industrialization is generally used to produce operations, few directors can impress the audience with a strong personal color. Ghost director Wes Anderson is one of the "minorities". Rapid panning, zoom, overhead shooting and other lens language, high saturation tones, symmetrical composition, futura fonts everywhere, these symbolic elements, attract fans to tirelessly discuss repeatedly, and its pursuit of picture beauty, but also make the perception of his film like opening a beautiful picture book.
△ "French Mission"
The recent release of "The French Dispatch" once again brought the audience back to the fairytale world created by Wes Anderson. In addition to its usual iconic style, the film bundles together three story lines to tell the funny story of an American newspaper stationed in Paris in the 20th century.
Obviously, Wes Anderson works tend to overlook content other than exquisite pictures, but for a film, audiovisual language is the carrier of storytelling, and the plot itself is the real charm. In fact, since the beginning of his low-budget debut "Bottle Rocket", Wes Anderson has integrated unique dialogue, characters, and narratives into it.
This system was continued in the later animated films Fantastic Mr. Fox, Isle of Dogs, or his best-known masterpiece, The Grand Budapest Hotel.
△ "Welcome to the Grand Budapest Hotel"
Close-Up, which means "close-up" in cinematic terminology, refers to a shot that focuses on a certain part, zooms in on details to achieve the artistic effect of emphasizing or advancing the plot. A good film can be interpreted in multiple ways, and in the same way, a great director has different sides. Today, we focus on the plot of Wes Anderson's film itself, taking a look at what features it has besides audiovisual language.
Where does the sense of absurdity pervade the Wes Anderson films come from? The nonsensical dialogue is the source of this wonderful theatrical atmosphere. The characters in the play often speak inappropriate lines, and sometimes an ordinary dialogue is suddenly interrupted by a trivial matter.
In "Welcome to the Grand Budapest Hotel", after M. Gustave successfully escapes from prison, he and the doorman Zero stand at the meeting place, chatting calmly and idly, until the siren gradually approaches, and the two reluctantly end this endless idleness and get up to escape. Or, in M. Gustave was comforting Mrs. D when he caught a glimpse of her newly applied nail polish and began to spit out its unsatisfactory color.
△ "Isle of Dogs"
In addition, jokes due to the language barrier are also a common dialogue technique used by Wes Anderson. For example, the people and dogs in "Isle of Dogs", the Americans and Indians in "The Darjeeling Limited", these chickens and ducks talk about the bridge, so that the audience can't help but laugh.
Owen Wilson, the "elder" in Wes Anderson's films, is probably the actor who best interprets this language pattern. The slightly neurotic and nerdy lines, flowing out through his slow, languid tone, seemed so natural. In fact, this interesting dialogue was laid by Owen Wilson, a college friend of Wes Anderson and co-writer of three of his early works.
△ "Life in the Sea"
The unfolding of the story often requires a "motive". The motivation for Wes Anderson's films mostly comes from the protagonist's obsession.
For example, Digin in "Off-line Cupola" dreams of plotting a "perfect crime"; Max Fischer frantically pursues a much older female teacher in "It's All The Trouble of Love"; Margot and Richie in "The Genius Family"; Steve Zissou in "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" swears to find tiger sharks to avenge his friends; Darjeeling Ltd. The three brothers pursue their lost lives; in "Isle of Dogs", the boy travels alone to The Isle of Dogs to save his dog.
These attachments may also give rise to opposing "attachments." The fox father in "Super Mr. Fox" broke the stable life because he could not stop stealing. The stolen human ranchers are also obsessed with catching foxes in an almost insane way and at any cost.
"Obsession" as a dramatic conflict that runs through the film forces the characters to become incomprehensible and lose both. At the end of the story, it usually ends with "letting go of obsession", some have fulfilled their long-cherished wishes, and some have compromised on life, but in fact, no matter what, Wes Anderson seems to be telling the audience that life will continue only by letting go of obsession.
△ Moonrise Adventure Kingdom
Wes Anderson's usual multi-line narrative is not unique, but it is not common for directors who are so fond of "narration" nowadays. Each of his films features narration, either through the mouth of the protagonist or from the omniscient perspective of a third party.
"Welcome to the Grand Budapest Hotel" appears in the narration from different perspectives, from the writer's record to the old man's narration, suggesting that the reader reads the writer's novels - the writer listens to the old man tell the past - the old man personally experiences the time and space change between the three.
On the one hand, the narration can help the audience understand the intertwined multiple story lines, and on the other hand, it can also remind the audience all the time that Wes Anderson is the storyteller.
And the form of the narration is not a single one, "Darjeeling Co., Ltd.", "Moonrise Adventure Kingdom", "Welcome to the Grand Budapest Hotel"... Almost every movie has a scene of reading letters, and these letters have become a trick to switch stories, plump characters, and explain the plot.
△ "Genius Family"
Sensitive and precocious children, naïve and naïve adults, are the "regulars" in Wes Anderson's films. This kind of behavior between children and adults is reversed, and sometimes appears in the same character. The genius family in "Genius Family" showed a mind far beyond that of their peers at an early age, raising their hands and feet as if they were adults, but when they grew up, they maintained a fading childishness. In fact, this is also a portrayal of the director himself, sentimental people, always "out of place".
△ "It's all the trouble of love"
Because of this, there are always friendships between teenagers and adults in Wes Anderson movies. In "It's All the Trouble of Love", Max Fischer, a middle school student who longs for maturity and loves adult style, meets her boring family life, rude son and desperate middle-aged man Herman Blume, and quickly forms a yearless friendship.
However, in the movie, children still reveal the nature of this age, and adults also show the maturity they should have. It shows that the former is not really old,And the latter is not blindly naïve. This may reflect a general popular psychology – in childhood there is always a desire to grow up, but when you grow up, you are afraid of getting old.
In such childlike films, the often fight scenes seem contradictory, but "violence" does appear in every Wes Anderson movie. In his films, the characters are often awkwardly wrestled together, and Wes Anderson observes these behaviors from a child's perspective, perhaps mocking the needlessness of violence in this way.
Nevertheless, "death" did happen again. In "Isle of Dogs", the Dog Clan is abused and killed by humans, and in "Welcome to the Grand Budapest Hotel", M. Gustave was also killed by fascists.
While death doesn't seem so real in sweet hues, Wes Anderson tries to tell stories of grief in a playful tone to awaken the softest parts of people. As the line in the movie goes, "Human nature is the faint light that remains in the barbaric slaughterhouse".
The moving audiovisual language has become a well-known label for Wes Anderson. But at the end of the day, Wes Anderson is just a storyteller, using the adult fairy tales he weaves to explore friendship, love, affection, war, culture, children's troubles, and adult regrets. The "nonsense behavior" in the eyes of adults is commonplace in his films, and perhaps the director himself hopes that this place can become a utopia for people to pin their innocence.