Even if you’ve never seen a Wes Anderson movie, you’ve probably seen the American Express commercial he made in 2004, which was ubiquitous on American TV: between takes on a movie set the hip young director marches around giving instructions to his actors, noting the makeup job on a geisha character, conferring with his prop man on a suitable weapon for a scene (“Can you do a .357 with a bayonet?”), and putting a $15,000 helicopter rental on his AmEx before he seats himself on a camera crane and floats heavenward. This giddy episode always reminds me of that old Orson Welles saw, in which he referred to the RKO studio lot as “the biggest train set a boy ever had.” The primary appeal of Anderson’s movies is this very sense of a spoiled kid having the time of his life.
No amount of visual invention can substitute for characters, though, and Anderson doesn’t so much write characters anymore as recruit a great cast and dress them up: in The Grand Budapest Hotel, Tilda Swinton dons old-age makeup to play one of M. Gustave’s paramours, Adrien Brody twirls a wax moustache as her enraged son, Bill Murray wears muttonchops as a courtly concierge at another hotel, Willem Dafoe plays a vicious thug with a flattop and underbite dentures that make him look like a bulldog, and Saoirse Ronan, as young Zero Moustafa’s love interest, sports a big red beauty mark on her cheek in the shape of Mexico. When we learn that Zero’s parents were both murdered during civil strife in their native land, and that M. Gustave later comes to a tragic end, such grim events seem to transpire in a different world from the candy-colored building of the title.
In a striking coincidence, The Missing Picture also imagines a film studio as the biggest train set a boy ever had. When Panh was growing up in Phnom Penh, one of his neighbors was a film director, and Panh spent countless hours watching him work. “I loved the wonderful wigs and costumes, the colors and gold, the land of giants and fairy tales,” he recalls. His diorama of the studio is populated by dozens of clay extras, crew members, and actors, not to mention the director calling through his megaphone; a long horizontal pan across the entire scene uncannily replicates Wes Anderson’s American Express commercial. But this world was lost too: under the Khmer Rouge, film artists were executed or sent out to the rice fields to atone for their vanity. You have to wonder why they didn’t hire a helicopter and get the hell out of there. Surely they could have put it on the card.
The Missing Picture ★★★★ Directed by Rithy Panh
