pabstcanrocketship

I'm off and on with Wes Anderson. I generally don't regret watching his movies, but I've only LOVED one or two. This is one, now.

The movie feels like the pinnacle of what Anderson has been striving for his whole career. It's EXTREMELY Wes Anderson-y, which doesn't always work to his stories' benefit, but it really does here. The script is funny and quaint and writerly and unusually fast-paced. It's an anthology film with a frame narrative, and the compact brevity of each weird little story kept me fully engaged throughout.

It's a rare movie that I wish it wouldn't end, but this is one.

This movie's alright. It doesn't stumble or drag, all the acting is decent, and the plot is ultimately satisfactory. I like how it ended.

But the cinematography and the color and the framing ... all the shot decisions make this a VERY good-looking movie. Unusually so, for the type of film it is. It's so pretty on a technical level that I think it actually improved my opinion of the movie as a whole.

It's light entertainment. It's never bad, sometimes good, and always beautiful to look at.

At the beginning you think this is going to be a "bad person gets their comeuppance" type movie. Our protagonist is no mere con artist or huxter - she's deeply thoroughly reprehensible and irredeemable. So, okay, I'm ready to watch her do her thing, and then get what she deserves in the end, right?

But somewhere along the way the film begins to treat her not as the bad guy we want to see go down in flames, but as a feminist anti-hero archetype. Don't get me wrong, I'm definitely game for a movie with a feminist anti-hero archetype! But this character is simply not that. She's so horrible and insidious that I found myself willing to handwave the literal sexual slavery that the Russians were doing, just so I could have SOMEONE to root for! The movie seems totally oblivious to this issue, and plows ahead for a much too long runtime, all the while assuming I was hoping this wretched person would pull through. I just didn't buy it, and I was not at all in the headspace the film seemed to expect me to be in (and, really, who would be??).

That being said, it's quite well-shot and well-acted. It just needed to be shorter and to treat its main character as the villain she is.