Counter-view worth a view: Richard Brody in the New Yorker reviewing Asteroid City and arguing that Wes Anderson, contrary to appearances / conventional critiques (including my earlier Decline of the Wes take), is a deeply emotional auteur and a political one too...
(Here's his similarly angled takes on The French Dispatch and on Moonrise Kingdom)
Oh dear, he's very nearly convinced me that I'll have to see Asteroid ("will get fooled again").
Counter-view worth a view: a reading of Jacques Tati's Playtime by Charlie Bertsch, very different to my own in the aforementioned Decline of the Wes triptych but no doubt closer to how Tati intended the film to be taken. One point where our opposed readings converge is connecting the Tati reaction to modernity with the Situationist critique.
The stumbling block for me as a recent first-time viewer approaching it with no preconceptions or foreknowledge is that I simply did not find the look of Playtime to be grey, soulless, or even especially dehumanized (the technocratic spaces are after all teeming with humans bustling about and being bumblingly comic... not to mention that the spaces are built by humans and wouldn't exist without human design and human imagination). However Tati intended it to be received, to me the Paris of Playtime is shimmeringly attractive - as beautiful in its own way as the old city with its traditional Gallic charm and ancient buildings. But that may well be a trick effect of time's passage, the way that the Mid-Century Modern / New International aesthetic has a nostalgic allure now, its own period charm.
1 comment:
Not sure if yr reaction is just nostalgia - iirc, Tati was specifically keen that the architecture in Playtime be *good* International Style architecture, on the grounds it'd be too lazy to present it as bleak, looming, shabby, etc etc - which didn't put a lot of other people off.
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