Wes Anderson' s new film Asteroid City, presented in official competition at the Cannes Film Festival, is a radical departure from his usual style. This is obviously not true. The filmmaker falls back into his traditional aesthetic lapses - rapid pano, vertical and horizontal dollies, split-screens and characters who place themselves back in the center of the frame. Habits that please many, repel others, and reach new heights here, as the American definitively favors container over content. Empty of any real narrative stakes, the (admittedly beautiful) machine ends up running on empty.
Asteroid City will be available on Max from April 21, 2025.
Synopsis: Asteroid City is a tiny town in the desert southwest of the USA. The year is 1955. The site is most famous for its gigantic meteorite crater and nearby astronomical observatory. This weekend, the military and astronomers welcome five gifted children, distinguished for their scientific creations, to present their inventions. A few miles away, over the hills, you can see atomic mushrooms caused by nuclear testing.
1955. In a fictional American desert town, young students and their parents gather for a scholarly competition when an alien invites itself to the party. This is the setting - somewhere between Hopper and Hockney - set by a writer (Edwart Norton) whose work Asteroid City is soon to be performed on stage. Wes Anderson 's film thus moves back and forth meta-wise between the setting of scenes and actors (in a square black-and-white image format) and said scenes (in the director's recognizable style), launched on screen by the writer and a moustachioed Bryan Cranston. Expectedly, the boundaries between reality and fiction become permeable on several occasions, but the meta aspect slows down the narrative, as does the fragmentation of the film subdivided into acts.
By trying to shoehorn his entire gang of friends into micro-scenes belonging to the same sequence (nearly 30 actors and actresses from Wes Anderson's universe and beyond, including Tilda Swinton, Adrian Brody, Willem Dafoe, Edward Norton, Tom Hanks, Margot Robbie, Maya Hawke, Steve Carrel), the filmmaker loses the essence of what he's trying to say, and doesn't make the most of certain characters that could have been succulent - the trio of little sisters, the Goonies HPI gang, and even that alien from a Tim Burton film.
A few zany outbursts ofabsurdity , like timid caricatures of the '50s (atomic tests that scare no one, a parody of the CIA and a tender satire of the USA as bellicose as it is bigoted), fail to make up forAsteroid City 's gentle superficiality, except for the exchanges between Jason Schwartzman and Scarlett Johansson, which are free of unnecessary camera movements and, in fact, very apt. As is the dialogue between the same Schwartzman and Margot Robbie - who seems to have been removed from the film like her character in the play - which is disturbingly beautiful, but too short.
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