Wes Anderson
Asteroid City

Whatever the actual evaluation of the film, every time I watch a new work by Wes Anderson, I am certain I have witnessed the birth of an Artist and a genius, and this is the necessary premise.

There is much to say and reflect upon regarding Asteroid City, which I believe to be Anderson's most complex film made so far, continuing a path of ongoing growth, auteurial exploration, and evolution. After Isle of Dogs, something has changed in the films of the Texan director, becoming less entertaining and emotional but more theoretical and cerebral, almost abstruse and cryptic, pushing to the extreme reflections that were, in reality, already present since the times of Rushmore, especially on a formal and metatextual level.

Asteroid City, just like The French Dispatch, is in some ways a repellent film, but the author of The Royal Tenenbaums always gives the impression of raising the bar higher each time, searching for a truth perhaps unattainable and which can remain hidden, concealed like a deleted scene, destined to remain solely in the memory of a secondary actress. Or suddenly appear in a photograph resulting from a stolen shot.

If for Lynch life—and the stage on which it plays out—is a dream, and for Fellini it's the film set and the art of the lie of a foggy and falsified memory, for Anderson everything is a play, a comedy in acts and chapters, a matryoshka of stories and narratives (as in his recent and extraordinary short The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, released on Netflix); and his characters are actors who finally get lost in the game of identification because that's where this search for truth leads.

You can't wake up if you don't fall asleep. You can't wake up if you don't fall asleep.

The train to Asteroid City, Club Silencio, the Transatlantic Rex, in the end, are part of the same universe.

Asteroid City does not exist. Asteroid City does not actually exist. And indeed, everything in Asteroid City, starting from the set design, is declared and manifestly fake. As it was inadvertently in the films of Ed Wood or explicitly in those of the aforementioned Fellini.

It's all recorded. It's all recorded. It's all fake and, nevertheless, for this reason, all true.

Of course, it is evident and inevitable that every time an Anderson film is released, the criticisms are always the same, banal, superficial, and predictable, unable to grasp the true essence and depth of his poetics. This is because the judgments always stop at the container, thus assuming a repetition that does not take into account the variations in content and nuances. And, as I was saying, these in Anderson are in constant motion.

The world changes, after all. The remnants of the pandemic are not yet erased (Covid is also the reason for Bill Murray's first absence in one of his films since the late '90s), and even in Asteroid City, this experience is present, not removed, within what is perhaps the first film in his career of which he wrote the screenplay alone, without the help of lifelong companions Owen Wilson, Roman Coppola (still a co-author of the story), Jason Schwartzman (here a true protagonist and not just a cameo) or Noah Baumbach. And Anderson, the eternal melancholic teenager, is today an adult, reflecting on himself and his cinema. He knows he cannot go back and relive youth with today's maturity and awareness. And this is the meaning of his research, as well as the strength of his work: a gradual acceptance of the passage of time and aging, of transience and our temporariness, passing through like perhaps just a shy alien.

God preserve Wes Anderson. One of the few true artists and geniuses of today.