A souffle of strangeness?

Note – Spoiler alert


I’ve seen three films in the last little while with children in lead roles. I Wish, Moonrise Kingdom and Monsieur Lazhar have seemingly little in common apart from this fact – but in each case, the presence of the children invests the film with charm and a fable-like quality that made me put away adult ways (scepticism, hard-heartedness, cynicism).

The Girl’s Own Annual overlay of Moonrise Kingdom was especially appealing. It was beautiful to look at, like a faded Polaroid, or the pages of a picture story book from the 1960s (it was set in 1965). Situated on an island off the coast of New England, two 12 year olds run away from home. This is not a gritty urban runaway story, despite the fact that the boy, Sam, is an orphan living in a foster home, and the girl, Suzy, is unhappy at school and feels misunderstood at home. Each starts out on the adventure with a lot of equipment (she takes a cat in a basket, a portable record player and several hardback books, he carries a pipe and enough camping equipment for a scout troop. The film is highly stylized – reminiscent in look and feel to the new app The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Less more.
Critic Roger Ebert describes it thus: “Anderson always fills his films with colors, never garish but usually definite and active. In "Moonrise Kingdom," the palette tends toward the green of new grass, and the Scout's khaki brown. Also the right amount of red. It is a comfortable canvas to look at, so pretty that it helps establish the feeling of magical realism”  and Peter Bradshaw from the Guardian says: “Where David Lynch finds a dark horror beneath the wholesome exterior, Anderson sees something else — something exotic but practical and self-possessed, a world that ticks along like an antique toy, much treasured by a precocious child. The homes and buildings often look like giant dolls' houses.”

The adult world depicted in all three films is fraught – by relationship issues, war, suicide, loneliness, displacement. And so each film-maker is able to generate a contrast between the adult world and the children’s world – of perspective, of capacity to respond to the world, of tone. Monsieur Lazhar is the bleakest, dealing as it does with suicide, war and refugees. In this film, the children cannot escape these issues and the film is potentially quite dark. We watch it knowing that it can’t (and shouldn’t) end well. What makes it bearable is the relationships created in the classroom between the children and their teacher and his determination to acknowledge and work with the pain they’ve experienced as a group. In this he shows great respect for what children are capable of both feeling and working through.

Koreada, who directed I Wish, showed this kind of respect in Nobody Knows, his 2004 film that focussed on a family of children abandoned by their parents trying to survive in the Tokyo suburbs without adult support. He is a director who is very skilled at working with children. In I Wish, the lead characters are played by two real-life brothers who play brothers separated when their parent’s marriage breaks up. Living in different cities, they miss each other and what the family was and the plot to get the parents back together (the “I wish” of the title). The film is about the wishes and fantasies of children, as all three films are to some extent. There is a sweetness in the story, a humanism and charm in the kids that made me put aside things that I would normally criticise. I liked being in the optimism of the kids’ zone – they thought they could do things, change things. All three films give children a degree of agency, inventiveness and care for each other that is often missing in films about children.

It’s maybe no accident that I’ve connected I Wish and Moonrise Kingdom. Roger Ebert says, of Wes Anderson “In Anderson's films, there is a sort of resignation to the underlying melancholy of the world; he is the only American director I can think of whose work reflects the Japanese concept mono no aware, which describes a wistfulness about the transience of things. Even Sam and Suzy, sharing the experience of a lifetime, seem aware that this will be their last summer for such an adventure. Next year they will be too old for such irresponsibility.”
I could write more, as others have, about the symbolism inherent in Moonrise Kingdom (the coming of the flood, America in a time of innocence (early 60s – innocent – really?) etc etc) but these things weren’t strong factors in the charm of this film for me. Bradshaw says it better than I can: “Anderson's movies are vulnerable to the charge of being supercilious oddities, but there is elegance and formal brilliance in Moonrise Kingdom as well as a lot of gentle, winning comedy. His homemade aesthetic is placed at the service of a counter-digital, almost hand-drawn cinema, and he has an extraordinary ability to conjure a complete, distinctive universe, entire of itself. To some, Moonrise Kingdom may be nothing more than a soufflé of strangeness, but it rises superbly.”