"Terrible things happen in Wes Anderson films. In his latest, The Phoenician Scheme, a man is casually split in half in an aircraft crash. In The Royal Tenenbaums, the patriarchal protagonist feigns a terminal illness in order to weasel his way back into his estranged and dysfunctional family. In The Grand Budapest Hotel the heroic concierge Monsieur Gustave is essentially a killer and the fictional Republic of Zubrowka is in the tightening grip of a fascist regime."
"All this is played for knowing comedic effect (the splatted bisection resembles a Tom and Jerry cartoon; Zubrowka is a brand of Polish bison grass vodka), while lavishly sugarcoated in a set dressing of eccentric curios, outlandish costumes and saturated colour. Anderson aficionados will be familiar with the drill, a bit like finding a gnat in a cupcake, delivered in a series of perfectly composed vignettes."
"The format is by now familiar, featuring a curated trove of archive material arranged film by film. Among the 700 objects exhumed from a warehouse in Kent are costumes, wigs, sketches, models, fictional books, fictional art, a tent, a typewriter and dozens of stop-motion puppets. Upper-class elites costumes from The Royal Tenenbaums on display. The 30-year cinematic arc begins with Bottle Rocket, an unlikely mid-90s homage to Scorsese's Mean Streets, and ends with The Phoenician Scheme, released earlier this year to mixed reviews."
Wes Anderson films juxtapose dark incidents and moral ambiguity with a meticulously crafted, whimsical visual language and sardonic comedic tone. A Design Museum exhibition curates three decades of his cinema as an expanded show developed with the Cinémathèque Française, arranging archive material film by film. The display includes about 700 objects recovered from a Kent warehouse: costumes, wigs, sketches, models, fictional books and art, tents, a typewriter and stop‑motion puppets. Exhibition design by Ab Rogers uses a progression of red hues across rooms, enhancing the films' eccentric mise‑en‑scène and inviting close inspection of recurring props, costumes and production details.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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