A delight

Rating: Null/10 (13 April 2015)

At the same time as the Coens have hit a snag in visual imagination and the ability to roam freely, Wes Anderson soars. This has all the lithe irreverence of early Coens, the paradox of Lubitsch, with the self-reference of Greenaway back when he was still making ripples.
The structure could be out of Greenaway and tuned to much the same purpose, nested fiction so that we can move to a broader view of life that includes the stage where it acts its dramas - narrators nested within narrators, a girl reading a book by an author who narrates about an encounter he had with another narrator, who narrates over dinner about his escapades with a master storyteller caught in a fiction.
Deep down it's the encounter with this master storyteller that matters, a concierge in a hotel, superficially frilly at first sight, but someone we come to realize who cultivates the entire space of the hotel with a storyteller's affection for the contours of duplicitous life, who knows when to gently hover, when to anticipate and direct, when to throw himself earnestly in the creation of memorable f(r)iction for his elderly patrons.
The fiction he's caught in and sends him to prison and eventually all the way up to a monastery in the Alps is where he's framed by greedy relatives for murder. Its own commentary on art and narrative that again recalls the sardonic best of Greenaway in Draughtsman - the storyteller framed by boorish patrons who can only imagine a boorish story, lecherous gigolo exploiting vulnerable old women. We know from our position as viewers that he was a character in a fiction spun for her enjoyment and thrill (and his profit of course), but spun in earnest, with genuine care.
And this is what Anderson does as storyteller of the whole thing. Spinning obvious fiction shown to be artificial on all sides (one that we enter through a book), but doing it with earnest love for the snowflakes of truth he can elicit on every step. I find here a succulent love between human beings that I first admired in the teenage romance of his Moonrise - as dry and static was Life of Zissou, so much richer these last two films have been.
On the whole I'm beaming after this, which I saw twice in as many days. It's such a pleasure to watch Anderson bloom in this way - this is surely his mature period and after the sublime Moonrise he's become for me one to cherish and keep an eye on.
The controlled symmetries have been toned down, they're still here, but gone is the coffee shop lassitude, replaced by a dynamic asymmetry first introduced in Moonrise - between what we see and what what is narrated or what we imagine, like the image of prisoners feet dancing in air above the sleeping wardens, a poetic image that hovers for a brief second until the next one explains it. There's a magnetic pace here that comes as a result of paradoxically dismantling expectation - Lubitsch. This along with how music is melded to it merits its own viewing.