The man who claims he can see with his eyes closed. A man who claimed that he flew like a swan in his childhood. The man who claimed that he could kill a mouse without touching it. The man who claimed that a poisonous snake was sleeping in his belly. This strange company could previously be found in the literature of writer Roald Dahl, and now in the cinema of Wes Anderson, appearing on the screens. second time in a year (Honestly, it’s scary to think about how much we’ll have to pay for the long summer and 2023’s glorious movie library).
“The Wonderful Story of Sugar Henry” ceased to be a feature film and became the first of four short films based on Dahl’s stories: it and “The Swan” were taken from the collection of the same name, and two more—”Someone Like You” from the collection “The Village of Hamelin” Piper” and “Poison”. The first three have never been seen before, either on big or small screen, but with the last one Anderson takes the stage after a very difficult warm-up – Alfred Hitchcock (the first episode of the fourth season of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents anthology, directed by the director himself) and, worse still, Dahl himself ( The fifth episode of the second season of the anthology “True Stories”, the introduction was recorded by the author himself). Let’s not create tension: he’s coping.
At this stage, it is already strange to recommend Anderson to someone: everyone who admires him has already watched everything himself, and those who are sick to death from local caramel puppetry, which caresses (or initially infuriates) all the necessary chakras in neurodivergent people, you cannot drag it by the ears, and this is not necessary. Moreover, after The Grand Budapest Hotel, the director clearly lost interest in deceiving some people, such as his own audience, and in making films for his own pleasure.
It sounds a bit boring, but there’s actually a lot of interesting stuff here – at least for those who sympathize. The collection of short films (which, by the way, does not have a common name) looks like something qualitatively new in the director’s filmography. Previously, Anderson (by the way, Dahl is adapting this for the second time – before that there was the cartoon “Fantastic Mr. Fox”) in his feature film created the candy reality as if from our colored pieces. particularly strange and colorful pebbles on a completely ordinary beach. This reality seemed extremely conditional, but the heroes living in it still obeyed it.
In a sense, Anderson stops making films in his own style in Henry Sugar and creates a separate environment with its own rules.
He is aware of his tectogenicity and is proud of it. It is believed that cinema, as an audiovisual art, should show, not tell. Here these thoughts are not at all relevant: the characters constantly chatter away with the text, as if it were a visualization of an audiobook rather than a film adaptation of these stories (at the end of each short there is also a brief information about the film’s circumstances). writing of the story). Some elements are not physically there, and the actors (a modest ensemble by the director’s standards of Benedict Cumberbatch, Ralph Fiennes, Dev Patel, Ben Kingsley, Richard Ayoade and Rupert Friend) play up their presence. On the contrary, they do not put some actions and feelings into action, they express them with words.
Film is at the intersection of theater and cinema. Everything is done in it: it turns out that the entire project was shot in a pavilion, and the combination of the cameraman and the production designer (not only the camera, but also the stage movements) is no less interesting to follow than the plot. Of course, there’s no fourth wall here either, with all these stories speaking directly to the viewer, with characters sometimes ignoring the boundaries erected (a funny parallel to the gag in The Naked Gun, where Leslie Nielsen calmly leans around the wall if you’re walking through it), and the stage mechanics that often appear in the frame use their services.
It is interesting that a certain humanity is not lost behind the violent formalism here. Principally, 40 minutes of “The Miraculous Case of Henry Sugar” are devoted to the previous hour and a half of “Asteroid City,” in which the film adaptation of this play is embedded in a film about the making of a fictional play; The short version is a story within a story within a story within a story. But there is a kind of paradoxical worldliness in the sudden tenderness of “A Wonderful Story”, in the cold seriousness of “The Swan”, in the black humor of “The Pied Piper” and “Poison”. This, yes, caresses all the necessary chakras.