Sigh (old man critic edition)
David Thompson decides that Wes Anderson didn’t live up to his potential. I feel like he totally missed postmodernism.
That was all the more apparent when Anderson released a 12-minute short, Hotel Chevalier, with Jason Schwartzman and Natalie Portman in a French hotel doing very real, blunt and sensual things (Portman was naked a lot of the time). This glimpse ran up half a million hits on iTunes, even as the big film (without it) staggered at “select” art house theatres. And who could miss the gulf between the inanity of the big film and the emotional force of the short? For that matter, who could fail to miss that Portman was the first wholesome compelling female in Anderson’s work?
It’s really telling that his explanation of the film’s “raw” “blunt” power is that it features a naked starlet. As we all know, the sexual objectification of women = edgy.
Critics have been creaming themselves over this 12 minute distilled essence of Anderson, but I think it’s just an excuse to show Portman’s scrawny posterior. She disrobes completely, while her lover Jason Schwartzman remains clad in his three-piece suit.
Sigh.