Asteroid City

My first solo film of the Curzon cult membership; the day after Barbie with a group: good feelings.

A festival of the imagination, with Hollywood stars (from memory Johansson, Hanks, Goldblum; from Wikipedia a ton more, including Barbie‘s Margot Robbie) playing around with Wes Anderson in a pastiche 50s UFO sesh. The City in question – a tiny and cheap tourist trap, more a glorified lay-by – grew up around a reported UFO-sighting, and it’s where our family arrives, as the son is a winner in a youth astronomy convention. Sure enough the alien returns, though that’s a small part of the action, and of the story.

L’Immensità

Anderson gets away, this time, with the artificiality of his sets and acting by literally making the film a staged play within a metanarratival frame. There’s some kind of connection here with the bizarre ending to Killers of the Flower Moon (see later blog entry).

Seen on my ‘official birthday’, one of the earliest of the Curzon membership. Afterwards I remembered a poster of the star, Penelope Cruz, in Volver, on the wall in my sister-in-law’s house. Impressive that this Spanish star is leading this Italian film – rarely does this Anglophone imagine such sideways bilingualisms.

Cruz plays Clara, a wonderfully mad mum: one of the earliest scenes is a fab setting of the table with her kids, choreographed to a loud dance track. The film then develops various ways of how she incurs disapproval, criticism from wider family, separation from husband, retreat into some kind of hospital/asylum, and then ultimate return and reuniting with her kids.

The film also explores the gender dysphoria of Clara’s daughter Adriana, who identifies as a boy called Andrea. As wiki says, ‘One day, Andrea befriends Sara, a Romani girl who knows him as a boy. Upon a shared sense of being outsiders, Andrea and Clara grow closer’. A good story, and portrayed brilliantly.

How they are related

Two families. Both are in some ways about being outsiders: in L’Immensità represented by Clara and Andrea, in Asteroid City by, I suppose, Jeff Goldblum’s comic-style alien, but at a deeper level the entire world of the film is so awkward that I, and I guess audiences in general, felt like an outsider. The focalisation of the little boy, too, helps us see the bizarre little town from an alien’s viewpoint. Both films, too, end with a return to the ‘real world’ – Asteroid with the play-within-a-play framing, L’Immensità with Clara’s return, but we could ask what films/stories don’t do that?

(But there is a nice twist: Cruz’s being Spanish in an Italian film is paralleled, in reverse, by L’Immensità‘s being filmed in Rome, instead of Spain as originally intended. Well – I tried.)