Wes Anderson
La trama fenicia

"What do you want to be when you grow up?"

"I don't know. I think I want to have adventures. Not stay in one place."

Sam and Suzy, Moonrise Kingdom

Wes Anderson's cinema is made of cycles and recurrences, declarations of intent, internal reflections. Every Wes Anderson film is a piece of a mosaic, and each expresses something deeper than the surface of an image, enclosed within a symmetrical frame. The Andersonian mosaic is a precise vision of life, the characters of the Texan director—as well as his fellow travelers and co-authors, above all Roman Coppola—represent a particular way of being in the world. Through a narrative that is always arranged in chapters, whether they are acts of a play, seasons, flashbacks, newspaper articles, episodes, Chinese boxes... or simply dreams.

"I don't live anywhere, I have no citizenship, I don't need my human rights"

Adventurism, the absence of fixed ties to one territory, the love rather for movement, are all characteristics that have permeated the cinema of the great American filmmaker since the days of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, obviously passing through the masterpiece Grand Budapest Hotel.

Today, with La trama fenicia, Wes returns, at times, to that kind of atmosphere, and above all to that adventurous spirit; after in his more recent works, at least in the previous Asteroid City, it had been dulled, momentarily set aside. In favor of a complex, demanding, theoretical film, perhaps abstruse at first viewing, which examined the entire sense of Anderson's poetics. Now, after only two years, it’s not easy to come after a work like Asteroid City, his ultimate and definitive work, as far as I'm concerned.

The best way, therefore, was probably to return to the entertainment of a story with an intricate plot, but essentially linear, easier to follow and much more fun. However, this doesn't mean that La trama fenicia is a lesser or less interesting work; quite the opposite.

Apart from the always meticulous attention to detail and aesthetics, which makes every frame resemble a painting, La trama fenicia talks about what all of Anderson's films talk about: death.

If Asteroid City was a huge metaphor for death and human transience, and how the creative process serves as a catharsis from something inconceivable but inevitable for anyone, La trama fenicia talks about how one always tries to escape the encounter with the inevitable departure. Even if it’s not possible to escape forever, it’s always worth not giving up and clinging to life as long as possible.

Asteroid City was filled with existential reflections, Grand Budapest Hotel carried within itself the haunting melancholy of a lost romanticism in the earthly dimension, but always present in the soul, like the memory of those we loved and saw leave. La trama fenicia doesn’t reach those heights, but it engages with an extraordinary cinematic experience, reminiscent of Hitchcockian espionage, in addition to parts that even evoke Kurosawa and Dreyer, like the dreamlike flashes in an incredible and brilliant black and white.

Dreamlike flashes that unfold within the story, like magical boxes containing dreams, thoughts, memories, unconscious fears, guilt, the desire for redemption.

La trama fenicia is atheism and religion, ideology and business, the opposites of a 20th-century world increasingly closer to vanishing in the rain.

The Andersonian adventure is (almost) always set in the past, not coincidentally, and this is no exception, as if the present we live in, so corrupted by modern technology, could no longer restore a certain way of riding events and life itself, a certain way of living. It is, therefore, in the world of the past—here the 1950s, as in the fiction of Asteroid City and the episodes of The French Dispatch, in Moonrise Kingdom the '60s, in Grand Budapest even further back in the '30s—that one can seek the spirit that is no longer here today. As if the past itself were that fascinating old ruin, which we are no longer given to see.

Wes Anderson is and always will be this, the artist cannot change. Just as we wouldn't have asked Picasso and Botero to paint landscapes, or Fellini to direct an Italian western, we can't ask Wes to leave his universe or stop painting new parts of his great, immense mosaic of adventures, characteristic characters, romanticism, sagacious humor, and anticipation of death.