I had the chance to spend a bit of time with the auteur’s work in Paris last weekend, at the Cinémathèque Française. The complex, which contains several movie theaters, a museum, and a library, has a fabulous Wes Anderson exhibition on display through July 27th, and I would highly recommend that any of his fans pay a visit while they can.
The exhibition, which is laid out chronologically, covers Anderson’s filmography from his humble Bottle Rocket days all the way through to the maximalism of Asteroid City. Along the way, hand-drawn character sketches, musical scores, costumes, and various pieces of ephemera illustrate the great care and detail that goes into making a film in Anderson’s idiosyncratic style. The best parts of the exhibition center on the director’s two animated films, Fantastic Mr. Fox and Isle of Dogs, whose stop motion characters and miniature set dioramas allow visitors to drop right into these carefully-curated worlds.
One point of interest for me, however, were the frequent whispers to Anderson’s Francophile tendencies. Of course, there is The French Dispatch, his love letter to the expat journalists of the mid-20th century, set in the fictional town of Ennui-sur-Blasé, but that film feels like the natural apex of a lifelong fascination with French culture. (It’s not even the only one of Anderson’s films set in France—let’s not forget his 2007 short, Hotel Chevalier, which sadly contributed nothing more than a bathrobe to this exhibition.)
François Truffaut’s film The 400 Blows (“Les Quatre Cent Coups”) has been well-noted as one of the director’s early influences, which led to a fascination with the French Nouvelle Vague that helped him develop a style more reminiscent of European cinema than that of his American contemporaries. He’s also cited the impact the New Wave director Louis Malle had on him, particularly The Fire Within, which not only inspired The Royal Tenenbaums, but is directly quoted in Anderson’s famed family comedy.
Photos by the French photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue feature in the backdrop of both Rushmore and The Aquatic Life of Steve Zissou, and apparently the name for the latter’s eponymous hero was borrowed from the nickname Lartigue had for his brother Maurice, whom the family called Zissou. The character and his misadventures, of course, were inspired by another French icon, the explorer Jacques Cousteau.
French songs, particularly from the 1960s, make frequent appearances in Anderson’s films, including Françoise Hardy’s “Le Temps de l’amour” (Moonrise Kingdom), Joe Dassin’s unforgettable earworm, “Les Champs-Élysées” (The Darjeeling Limited), Yves Montand’s “Rue St. Vincent” (Rushmore), Georges Delarue’s “Une Petite Ile”(Fantastic Mr. Fox), and Charles Aznavour’s “J’en déduie que je t’aime” (The French Dispatch).
Anderson has even, believe it or not, been honored as a Chevalier of the French Order of Arts and Letters. Not so surprising, once you see his influences begin to tally up. Even in his latest, The Phoenician Scheme, we get one notable Frenchman, a gangster by the name of “Marseille Bob,” played by the talented César-winner Mathieu Amalric. (Not enough to salvage the film, but worth a mention.)
Who knows which French references, actors, or settings we might get in a future Wes Anderson movie? One thing’s for sure, though—for this director, the New Wave will always be old hat.
Ciao, Catherine Rickman, Editor-in-Chief
P.S. There will be no newsletter next week, as we’ll be off for the Fourth of July! See you back here on the 9th.
