OFFICIAL SELECTION – COMPETITION
After having created the French city of Ennui-sur-Blasé, and that, American, of Liberty, in The French Dispatch, in competition at Cannes in 2021, the Texan Wes Anderson is pushing Asteroid City in the Southwest of the United States for his new film, also in the running for the Palme d’or. The American desert of Monument Valley, where the action is supposed to take place, in the mid-1950s, was reconstituted in Spain, about fifty kilometers from Madrid. The grey-green colors of Tea French Dispatch gave way to a new palette of gold and sky blue tones.
A service station, dinnera few barracks serving as accommodation, a yellow chick train… that’s it for the decor fifties. In the middle, a band of gifted kids, their heads turned towards the stars – or the flying saucers, Monument Valley being also a land of fantasy around UFOs. For a weekend, soldiers and scientists welcome a handful of teenagers, who will be honored for their space-related inventions. An unexpected event will block this small world in this junk town, famous for its meteorite crater. In the distance, smoke from nuclear tests swirls…
An incredible cast
The device calibrated to the stone, developed by the meticulous filmmaker, multiplies the references and the echoes. To film Monument Valley, if only its fictional representation, is also to revisit the history of American cinema, with its cult films, The Fantastic Ride (1939), by John Ford; Once upon a Time in the West (1968), by Sergio Leone; Easy Rider (1969), by Dennis Hopper; Thelma and Louise (1991), by Ridley Scott; Forrest Gump (1994), by Robert Zemeckis, to name but a few.
Film of adventures, of conquest (here of space), of science fiction excess, Asteroid City is a bit of all of these. With the action taking place in 1955, the Marilyn Monroe era, glamor is also summoned to the set, in the presence of a star of the big screen – Midge Campbell, alias Scarlett Johansson, barely recognizable under her auburn wig. And men not always preferring blondes, the beauty will cause trouble.
Burlesque and tinged with melancholy, the story is like a great spectacle distilled into successive vignettes, the youth bringing the lot of disturbances that fall to the sorcerer’s apprentices. As usual, Wes Anderson parades an incredible cast: in addition to Scarlett Johansson, include Jason Schwartzman, Tom Hanks, Tilda Swinton, Willem Dafoe, Margot Robbie, Adrien Brody, Matt Dillon… Despite his ability to conceive rich imaginations, Wes Anderson takes us here in a little too familiar territory.
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