Fantastic Mr. Fox

 

 Having a soft spot for Wes Anderson, I was ready to love his new movie Fantastic Mr. Fox, but I wasn’t prepared to adore it.

Based upon a children novel by English writer Roald Dahl (the very first book that Anderson received as a gift when he was 7 years old), the movie has been made in a very sophisticated yet very sweet stop-motion animated technique. 

Mr. Fox, his wife Felicity and their son Ash live a decent life in a decent hole but Mr. Fox, who promised to his wife two years earlier to give up stealing poultry as a job, is dreaming big dreams and he decides (against his lawyer’s advise) to buy a new home inside a lovely tree.

Once settled down, Mr. Fox (now a journalist) is unable to resist to the temptation of stealing from his new neighbours, the awful farmers Boggis, Bunce and Bean. Helped by his friend, the opossum Kylie, and by the sweet and smart Kristofferson (Mr. Fox’s nephew), they managed to steal many products from the three bad guys, but then they have to face their terrible revenge. To escape from it, Mr. Fox and his family dig a deep tunnel under the three farms, finding a bunch of other animals whose houses have been destroyed by the fury of Boggis, Bunce and Bean. After many adventures (more stealing, a flooding, a starvation problem, and various attacks), Mr. Fox and his friends will be able to outflank the enemies and be happy again (with great news coming along…).

I’ve always loved obsessive filmmakers.

Artists that, no matter how many movies their career is made of, will always talk about the same few things.

Let’s say no more than three themes per film, and Anderson is definitely one of them.

What he has created, film after film (6 in total), is a very personal world, parallel to the real one, where you can recognise the same characters, the same kind of situations, the same sense of humour, the same difficulties to face, the same happiness to look for. The fact that Anderson often uses the same actors to play in his movies just magnifies this sensation: Jason Schwartzman, the Wilson brothers, Bill Murray and Anjelica Huston, to name few of them, are part of the Anderson family. The filmmaker even writes his stories with the same people, especially with his friends Noah Baumbach and Owen Wilson.

In his cinema, the complexity of family's ties is central. As well as the difficulties of growing up. Very often, there is a character that feels at odd with the rest of humanity: usually a hyper-sensitive, hyper-intelligent, not very sporty, totally nerd, funny and romantic guy who is in trouble to find his place into his family and into the real world (my favourite one is still Max Fischer from Rushmore, but little Ash from Fantastic Mr. Fox is another good example of it).

In this last movie, it is incredible to see how much andersonian looks the world imagined by Dahl.

 

 And somehow, having animated puppets instead of human beings, gives to Anderson's world a deeper resonance, a lighter breath and a heightened sensibility. For sure, the "voices" chosen were pivotal in creating these great effects: George Clooney as Mr. Fox, Meryl Streep as Mrs. Fox, Jason Schwartzman as Ash, Willem Dafoe as Rat, Bill Murray as Badger... they're all more than perfect, but the little miracle here is the adorable Kristofferson's voice (courtesy of Wes Anderson's younger brother, Eric).

A last word about the music, that in Anderson's cinema always plays a very important role and it is amazingly used.

In Fantastic Mr. Fox, I was happily surprised by a song written and performed by Jarvis Cocker (now that I think about it, he is SO perfect for Anderson's universe!) but even more delighted to hear a couple of scores by Georges Delerue taken from two different Truffaut’s movies: Les Deux Anglaises et le Continent and La Nuit Américaine.

This last one is actually the same used by Zazie for her tribute to Truffaut in one of her first posts for this blog.

Well, Mr. Anderson, it looks like we have faith in the same God...

The Limits of Jim Jarmusch

There’s nothing more disappointing in life than a bad movie by a film-maker you like, and this is absolutely the case with the last Jim Jarmusch work, The Limits of Control. Apparently, we have to put the blame on some film critics, who accused Jarmusch to have turned into an almost mainstream film-maker with his previous movie, Broken Flowers. Jarmusch, the king of independent American movie, hurt by the accusation, decided to write and direct a completely free and non-commercial movie.
And, well, no doubt he succeeded in doing so, but the problem is that, in the enthusiasm of re-establishing and re-confirming his complete freedom as an artist, he also completely forgot that there would have been an audience, looking at his movie. Judging from the number of people quitting the cinema yesterday afternoon, the audience tried to forget Jarmusch as well.
The plot: a lone man (good actor Isaach De Bankolé, a familiar presence in Jarmusch universe) leaves France to Spain to accomplish a mysterious mission. Arrived in Madrid, he starts to have “meetings” with different people, with whom he exchanges boxes of matches containing incomprehensible (at least for us) messages. Following the advice of one of them, the man moves to Sevilla and then to another unspecified place where there is the “target” he’s looking for. Once the job completed, the solitary man got back to his normal (?) life.

I’m usually not afraid of very slow movies. Movies where apparently nothing’s going on but in reality there’s much to follow and to understand. At the beginning of this film I thought: Ok, this is just the start, many things are going to happen, I’ll be taken by the story, or by the atmosphere, or… after 30 minutes, I understood that my great expectations would have been frustrated.
This movie is BORING; it is simply, unbearably, boring.
The parade of magnificent actors (among others Tilda Swinton, John Hurt, Gael Garcia Bernal, Bill Murray) not only doesn’t help, but contributes to frustrate the public even more: do you have all these great actors and do you use them this way, Jim???
But the thing that really surprised me here is the total lack of irony, usually a very important element in Jarmusch works. The repetition of the same dialogue is very funny, yes, sure, for the first three times, the fourth time it just sucks. The lone man always ordering two espressos in different cups, yes, very funny indeed… but even in this case, the fourth time he is doing so, you just want him to order a bloody double espresso. And if there’s a secret meaning behind this gesture, well, who gives a damn.
In fact, this is a total “who gives a damn” movie.
I found the final dialogue by Bill Murray (representing, I guess, the movie’s core) very pretentious and ridiculous. Who’s talking about? Who are the people that have the “objective” vision of the world to be opposite to the people (and here again… who? The Artists?) having a subjective vision of things?
Please, Jim, give us a break.

Well, let’s say at least two things I really loved of this movie:
The first one is the photography, absolutely amazing, and I wasn’t surprised to read that the cinematographer of The Limits of Control is Mr. Christopher Doyle (the Australian genius behind In the Mood for Love by Wong Kar Wai and Paranoid Park by Gus Van Sant, for instance).
The other one, but it is very personal, is the scene where John Hurt, talking about bohèmiens, quotes La vie de Bohème by Aki Kaurismaki, simply saying: There was a great Finnish movie about this some years ago. Kaurismaki and Jarmusch are very good friends, and they have this habit of quoting each other in their movies. I know, I know, it’s very “cinéphile”, but it’s cute!

Anyway, I want to be clear on this point: I LOVE Jim Jarmusch, and this is why I’m so disappointed with him.
Film-makers can be exactly as lovers: you know they can do better than that, they just have to prove it.