The Indelible Mark - Meanderings (VII)

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” (Leo Tolstoy, ‘Anna Karenina’)

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The late Scottish poet John Burnside, remarking upon the changing reading habits of the undergraduates that he taught, told of how those students no longer had the desire to read the classics. “I give them Anna Karenina to read, and they tell me that they get ten or so pages in, but then they give up because there are no sympathetic characters.” Burnside, quite reasonably, was aghast. If your reading is to be dictated by only the kinds of characters that you might want to be friends with, then you might be missing - by quite some way - the point of great art. Tolstoy hints at the problem in his novel’s opening line: happiness is tedious, so he isn’t going to bother with it.   

And yet, after watching Wes Anderson’s latest film The Phoenician Story, I found myself sympathising, albeit not quite siding, with Burnside’s erstwhile students. Not for the first time, I was struck by the gaping emotional void that occupies the centre of Anderson’s undoubtedly beautiful films. You might not be able to take your eyes from the screen - The Phoenician Story explodes across your retina and a contented smile creeps across your face - but you leave the theatre, as it were, alone. No character has taken your hand, let alone left an indelible mark upon your heart.

 

It’s not always been like this. Ralph Fiennes’ strict but charming and elegant concierge in The Grand Budapest Hotel quickly wins you over, and coupled with that film’s most marvellous and charismatic character, the building itself, allows the film to fizz and linger long in the memory. And despite the ghastly dysfunctionality of the family in The Royal Tenenbaums, you somehow still find yourself rooting for them (Tolstoy’s adage about unhappy families fits this film like a glove). But more and more, Anderson seems to be forgetting that style and framing and scrupulous attention to detail isn’t an excuse to neglect heart and emotion.  

One repeated visual motif suggests an unflattering yet apt analogy. The camera gazing down, directly from above, at the salon and then the bathroom of the unscrupulous businessman Zsa-Zsa Korda, shows us everything in 2D. I could not help but think of the ‘adventure’ lessons that you find in the language tutorial app Duolingo: those ones where you take control of a character - Junior, usually - and have vapid conversations with the likes of Zari, Lin and Falstaff the bear. It’s not entirely unfair to say that these simple Duolingo characters have a similar depth to some of Anderson’s protagonists.

 

Zsa Zsa prend son petit-déjeuner dans le bain

Of course, depth of character is not the problem with Anna, Vronsky and Konstantine. Perhaps what those students craved were morally flawless ciphers rather than real, complicated, contradictory human beings (or at least, to tackle their reading lists without a narcissistic urge to discover themselves between the pages). I wonder if Professor Burnside might have prescribed Dostoevsky’s The Idiot as a way into Russian literature, offering up the example of Prince Myshkin, a man who strives for purity. So much so that it drives him mad. 

But then to contradict myself a second time, what of a writer who didn’t care at all for Dostoevsky and who also found flaws in Tolstoy’s absolute pursuit of the truth. I could not give a fig about a single character in any of Nabokov’s novels or short stories - villains, spurned lovers, mad men and women - yet such is the unmatched beauty and inventiveness of the prose, you almost don’t want likeability to stand in the way of the stylistic fireworks. Maybe certain types of film demand more; or certainly those directors who find a signature and stick with it. Anderson’s ‘universe’ seems to want to indicate that human nature is boundless, volatile, and crucially redeemable (Nabokov isn’t interested in redemption: as Humbert Humbert remarks in Lolita, ‘you can always trust a murderer for a fancy prose style’, but not much else, and never redemption). In which case, if there’s to be redemption, we need to care about those who are to be redeemed. Interestingly, and as a further aside, when I read Nabokov, the colours and descriptions that his prose mainlines into my head, do conjure up something of Anderson’s palette and attention to detail.  

All of this was magnified by the second film that I saw that weekend. It’s taken me over twenty-five years to find space for Wong Kar-wai’s astonishing In the Mood for Love, but its combination of dazzling cinematography and deeply felt soulfulness mercilessly exposed the flaws of the Anderson film. Curiously, the acclaim that this film received - the decennial Sight and Sound ‘Top 100 Greatest Films of All Time’ poll currently places it at number 5 - was not universal, with certain reviews dismissing it as ‘little more than a bauble, an ultimately unfulfilling treat for the eyes’.

 

Style over story - essentially the accusation levelled at Anderson’s recent oeuvre - is nonsense here. The power of Wong Kar-wai’s vision, the way the film takes you out of a disorientating babble of voices and characters, settles, and then sweeps you along - you leave the auditorium in a daze - is made possible only through the beguiling and charismatic performances of the two leads and their situation: their largely unseen spouses are having an affair and they gently seek out each other to ascertain why. Without this, Wong Kar-wai’s style, his glorious fetishisation of objects, clothes, and space, might wash over you innocuously.  

Regarding these details, I could cite so many, but I’ll make do with just a few. Such as Su (played by the mesmerising Maggie Cheung) and the way that an extensive wardrobe of mandarin gowns accentuates her swaying figure. The colour and composition in the below still is stunning. 

Or the almost hypnotic shot of tea being stirred, the motion of Su’s wrist and hand and the winding teaspoon, as our two would be lovers - always unrequited - meet to try and unpick circumstance. I adore the semi-transparent green cups that have been selected here.      

Or the cramped and narrow spaces - we never get to see the city of Hong Kong in its expansive form - conjuring up an environment that begins to feel like a prison. Indeed, the image and motif that lingers longest is Su swaying lazily through the side-streets of the city, in and out of her apartment block, gliding phantom-like past Chow (a vulnerable yet charismatic Tony Leung Chiu-wai) on the stairs. Invariably she has gone in search of food - a method of escape - and carries a tiffin-tin like a lamp.

Primed, perhaps, by a painting that I recently encountered (Noah Davis’s Painting for My Dad, which I wrote about here) - I could not help but see Su’s peregrinations in Dantesque terms, a lost soul weaving through the backstreets and corridors of Hell. Indeed, without the fizz and the chemistry and the - let’s call it a dance - Su and Chow, Wong Kar-wai’s vision would begin to cloy, ultimately overloading our aesthetic sensibilities. 

It’s such a tightrope. A couple of false or clumsy steps, an unsubtle performance, or, dare I say it, a overly passionate clinch or embrace, and you risk turning your film into a perfume ad. But these two characters don’t miss a beat, never tread on each other’s toes. You care about them and you will them towards happiness. In that, they let you down, but in doing so they utterly win you over. 

   
To return for a moment to those cups. You feel that the aesthetic weight of these objects is embodied in the film’s two leads; the beauty has been earned. Su and Chow hold the cups and hold us rapt. The objects belong to the characters and therefore the story.   

Thinking about those cups caused me to return to Anderson’s film, and, in particular, a telling detail. Zsa-Zsa Korda has stacked his mansion with pieces of great art, and as the camera glides through rooms and up staircases, there’s a real thrill and surprise in encountering recognisable masterpieces. The art lover in me picked out René Magritte’s The Equator, as well as Renoir’s mawkish Enfant Assis en Robe Bleue, and one that I failed to recognise - but adored (or maybe I’m just a sucker for a bread-roll) - Floris Gerritsz van Schooten’s exquisite Breakfast Still Life With A Roast. Later on, I discovered that many of these paintings were originals that had been loaned to the filmmaker.

 

Floris Gerritsz van Schooten’s Breakfast Still Life With A Roast

 
Were these artworks earned though? Or rather, did Anderson’s characters deserve - so to speak - the weight of such beautiful accoutrements? You might argue that Korda, a ruthless businessman and egomaniac, is acquiring these paintings in the way that certain collectors and regimes around the world snap up Leonardos and Rembrandts, concerned purely with the asset rather than the aesthetic. As the credits rolled, these paintings got their own billing, almost like a curtain call. And it this, along with Anderson’s distinctive design, that has stayed with me. Of the performances and the story, I remember little. That makes it a failure. A beautiful and dazzling one, but still a failure.