In the game of "Guess the Director" the players look at images from Drowning by Numbers and various Wes Anderson movies and try to guess whether the director is Peter Greenaway or Wes Anderson. After three wrong guesses, you are held under water until you drown.
The shtick is exactly the same: lots of colour, maximalist sets full of appealing retro knick-knacks and artefacts, archly symmetrical shots, deadpan comic dialogue, games and other pursuits taken to the point of high eccentric elaboration. Almost every frame here could be from Anderson. In fact I don't like his stuff at all, but it's striking how this film makes the style wonderful by means of a good, engaging, meaningful script that, unlike Anderson, isn't just playing for cheap laughs and archly detached pomo dandyism, and is fully prepared to acknowledge the dark side. Anderson fans should seek it out to see how it's done. It renders at least half of his career irrelevant. And Greenaway invented it all years before Anderson even got started, then simply moved on.
A brilliant work, which, like so much of Greenaway, is about the brutal business of figuring out who's going to fatally take the fall - except this one's really funny.
The shtick is exactly the same: lots of colour, maximalist sets full of appealing retro knick-knacks and artefacts, archly symmetrical shots, deadpan comic dialogue, games and other pursuits taken to the point of high eccentric elaboration. Almost every frame here could be from Anderson. In fact I don't like his stuff at all, but it's striking how this film makes the style wonderful by means of a good, engaging, meaningful script that, unlike Anderson, isn't just playing for cheap laughs and archly detached pomo dandyism, and is fully prepared to acknowledge the dark side. Anderson fans should seek it out to see how it's done. It renders at least half of his career irrelevant. And Greenaway invented it all years before Anderson even got started, then simply moved on.
A brilliant work, which, like so much of Greenaway, is about the brutal business of figuring out who's going to fatally take the fall - except this one's really funny.