Moonrise at Cannes

Moonrise at Cannes

Wes Anderson's oddball children's romance kicks off the film festival

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Moonrise at Cannes

Pre-teen love and rainbow eccentricity opened the 65th Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday. Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom served up an unusually amusing, toybox-like fantasy as a curtain raiser to the 12-day festival known for its roll-call of prestigious titles and pensive arthouse fares. But actually, Anderson's film about two 12-year-olds who fall in love and elope captures the dual modality that Cannes has always juggled with masterful trickery: an auteur movie by a brand-name filmmaker, and a dash of Hollywood magnetics and red carpet-worthy cast. This year we'll especially see that a lot more in the next 10 days.

Moonrise Kingdom (which opens in Bangkok next month) is a children's love story crafted through that signature Wes Anderson's lens of childish quirk, dollhouse aesthetics, and a whiff of pre-pubescent sadness that comes when adults turn out to be more disappointing than children expect them to be. In the leading roles are two young newcomers, Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward, playing Sam and Suzy, two disaffected, alienated youngsters who're too smart for the people around them _ the kind of precocious kids that usually populated the Anderson's universe since Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, and his the deliciously sardonic animation Fantastic Mr Fox.

Set in the 1965 on a remote New England island accessible only by boat, Moonrise Kingdom is told largely through the eyes of the children _ of the two young lovers, and also of Anderson, perhaps the tallest kid in the room. When Sam and Suzy run away into the wilderness _ the benign forest and enchanting beach of this isolated island _ Sam's scoutmaster (Edward Norton), the island's sole constable (Bruce Willis), Suzy's lawyer parents (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand), along with a bunch of boy scouts who believe Sam is emotionally disturbed, set out to track them down as the hurricane warning sounds. Soon Tilda Swinton also turns up, magnificently overbearing, as a social worker bent on putting Sam in an orphanage.

At the centre of the film is that delicate feeling when young kids experience an emotion that's slightly beyond their years. Sam and Suzy as lovers on the run camp out on a lonely beach and, in a scene that's funny and touching despite the age of the lovers, test the invisible limits of their budding romance.

Anderson at his best makes his films a harmlesss fantasy, accentuated by the now-famous ice-cream-parlour art direction, as well as a wistful tale of growing pains. Moonrise Kingdom, like most of his films, concerns kids who sincerely believe they can behave like adults, while the grown-ups are unwittingly, often lovingly stuck in childish limbo. And here the name cast gets to participate in Anderson's expanding family of oddball adults; here Edward Norton and Bruce Willis in particularly come off endearing in an effortless way.

In the press conference after the screening, Anderson said he "didn't worry about [the theme of children discovering their sexuality]. That's where the script really began for me." The film, which he co-wrote with Roman Coppola, isn't actually based on Anderson's own pre-teen memory, though "it's the memory that I wanted to have happened to me. At the end, it's the moment of falling in love that I want to share."

A big part of the film's appeal is the era and the setting. The story is set in 1965, pre-Vietnam War, and the island where it takes place has a pathos of magical remoteness as if it were a scene from a storybook (the film was shot on super 16mm, and it has a mild souvenir-photo look). Anderson is certainly one of America's most unique filmmakers, and that quality largely comes from his gift in evoking a bubble of nostalgia that has a real weight in it _ not just another Instragam moment. Sam and Suzy are 12, "and when they are 18 they'd be in a very different kind of America," said Anderson. "That's the reason the story was set in that year. Also, the islands where we shot the film used to be accessible only by ferry, [but they have changed over the years] in the same way much of America did."

We'll see plenty of American in Cannes this year. Moonrise Kingdom is one of many Hollywood productions in the top-tier Competition this year. Over the next 10 days we'll also see Killing Me Softly, Andrew Dominik's film starring Brad Pitt; The Paperboy, Lee Daniels's film starring Nicole Kidman and Zac Efron; Lawless, a Depression ear film by John Hillcoat starring Shia Laboef; Cosmopolis, a diabolic Manhattanroad tip by David Cronenberg and starring Robert Pattinson; and On the Road, the adaptation of Jack Kerouac's book by Walter Salles.

You can find more reports on Cannes Film Festival on the Bangkok Post website, in the Arts and Culture section.

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