Wes Anderson & Artifice, again.

To honour the release of his latest deadpan centre-staged comedy, The Phoenician Scheme, it seems an appropriate time to look back at his most recent work. No, not Asteroid City. We’ve covered that. His arguably under appreciated Netflix anthology: The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar & Three More.

There is much to deconstruct about Wes Anderson’s quadrilogy of Roald Dahl adaptations. For example, take their obsession over narration: the characters reading every word of the original text verbatim, and what this means in regards to ‘faithful’ adaptation. Or, for an auteur such as Anderson, having four short films commissioned by a company like Netflix. What does this mean for the short film format, will it finally have a distribution platform to breathe in the current era of ‘content’? These are essays I would enjoy reading that I’m attempting to will into existence, but I’m personally more interested in Anderson’s current relationship with his style and how Henry Sugar (and associated shorts) differs thus far.

In my previous piece concerning Wes Anderson’s craft, my core argument pertained to how consistent some aspects of his style are compared to his contemporaries, but crucially, how he compares his style to handwriting. It is something intrinsically attached to him, that he is often unconscious of, and that changes over time. It is simply his preferred method of doing things. I think Wes Anderson is often accused of being too stylistically consistent, and the piece wasn’t meant to be a defence of him so much as an exploration how his style has changed. I found that these changes are easily noticable when compared side by side. The issue is it’s hard to look past the major hallmarks. If you took stills from Henry Sugar and Grand Budapest, both would likely have Ralph Fiennes, and likely have that washed-out-flat-pastel look, with the camera pinpoint opposite our subject. So what’s changed?

Wes has always had an affectation for handmade props and settings, and you could easily argue that he enjoys those things because they scratch the fourth wall with how curated they are. He likes the backdrops, he likes his inserts, he likes fingerprints. But with his more recent work, he seems to have only grown more fond of showing the fake-ness of these objects, or even directly walking the audience through the façade, showing off the prop more than having it exist believably. There is no explicit reason within the text of the film why he does this, I would argue again that it is simply what feels right to him. There’s a logic to creating worlds in this way, because every line of the original short story is spoken at us, perhaps too, we should see the stagehands bring on props in the same fashion.

Maybe there is some kind of scale for how strong these aspects of fourth wall breaking are. I thought this after I watched every story, they seem to be a litmus test for how far this technique can be pushed. It’s interesting how the invention of cinema was seen as a fatal blow to the theatre, as you can achieve a sense of realism there that cannot exist on the stage. With that in mind, it’s comedic in a way, to have a series of shorts so insistent on showing you the strings. How much can you film theatre, tell us it’s theatre, and have it adequately communicate a sense of believability to us?

The short Henry Sugar likely has the most agreeable offenses. It is the longest, and the first of it’s kind. The narrative is clear enough that you are likely to get it all, despite the characters changing costume mid-scene and the props that aren’t props and the stage coming apart and back together and back apart. I think we largely understand how these things come together but it is unlike most films. Even, I would argue, unlike Wes Anderson’s other work. The stage rarely separates entirely in his other films. Characters rarely move so obviously through what are visibly theatre stages. Though he flirts with a lot of these concepts in his later films, Asteroid City, and even the French Dispatch.

To put a name to it, if mise-en-scene refers to everything we see on screen, or literally what is ‘put-on stage’ then this usage is to ‘show-off stage’ All of these shorts use props or locations or characters that are representative of what they are, but are also, clearly and self-explanatorily, fake. Take for one example, the levitation effect in Henry Sugar. There is a moment where Imdad Khan (portrayed by Ben Kingsley) seeks out the Great Yogi (Richard Ayoade), to show how he meditates until he begins to float. To achieve this affect, we see Ayoade sat meditating, then he stands, steps to one side, and rotates a wooden crate until it presents a pattern that matches the backdrop perfectly, disguising it and making it appear as that he floats when he sits atop the crate. I’m perhaps stating the obvious here but, we know Anderson could use digital effects to make it appear as though the Great Yogi can float. Or, this action could’ve been cut around, or implied off-screen, or done practically with wires. Anything else. But Anderson chose to do it, by showing us the box first, then having Ayoade re-arrange it himself, and then have it assume it’s function in the narrative, it appears invisible against the background, he floats. I am not describing this to suggest that it is the best way of achieving this, but rather, it is simply an interesting decision. It is the only one in which we see the whole process and yes, it is like theatre.

The levitating box from Henry Sugar

All of the shorts are full of decisions such as these, some moreso than others. To offer something that is closer to film criticism here, I will compare a short I prefer, Poison, to a short that I still enjoyed, though found less affective, The Swan.

Both Poison and The Swan feature techniques that ‘show-off stage.’ In both, a narrator speaks directly to the camera throughout the story, walking you through the locations of the narrative. The shorts are broadly familiar in that they depict characters who are in a potentially life threatening situation. In Poison, a soldier awakens to find a venomous snake on his chest, and in The Swan, a boy named Peter Watson is bullied into jumping off a tree with a swan’s wings attached to his arms. However, Poison is told from an outsider’s perspective, another soldier attempting to help his comrade threatened by the snake. Whereas The Swan is told from the perspective of Peter now as an adult, in reflection. Much of The Swan’s narrative, we see through implication and charade rather than being shown to us directly. When Peter reflects upon his abuse, he himself impersonates the bullies mocking him. Occasionally they appear on stage portrayed briefly by various stagehands, without much visible emotion. Almost all of the story’s performance comes down to Rupert Friend’s delivery, who is fantastic in this when given the opportunity.

We experience the narrative largely through visual aid. Props being demonstrated to us but having no impact that resembles a real time sequence. When the bullies shoot at Peter in the tree, we see a stagehand miming a gun. When a train is rattling towards Peter, tied to the track, Peter holds up a small illustration of a train to show his perspective of it. Everything is just a gesture of the real thing.

I found The Swan fascinating in how much it alienates us here, but ultimately less emotionally affecting for this reason. Or at the very least, incredibly emotionally inconsistent, large in part because of the weight these techniques hold in their implementation. The moment Peter is tied to the tracks, despite Peter holding a small illustration of the train, the overall effect of the train approaching and barely missing him is handled incredibly well. It feels textural. The force of the train passing above, Friend’s reaction. It frustrates me how successful this is compared to the bullies shooting at Peter, where we see all the stagehands stood beside Friend as he narrates, looking entirely uninvested. We’re too far away from the story to feel involved.

The Adult and Child Peter Watson in The Swan

Of these shorts, Poison has probably the least frequent staged interruptions. We’re left far more in a moment that exists in real time. Which, for a short about a man discovering a poisonous snake asleep on his stomach, is ideal. There is a great urgency given to the movement of everything in Poison. Dev Patel’s rapid delivery, the camera tracking him as he darts about the set, utilising many long takes stretching across rooms forming and folding together in real time. Even the stagehands, when present, are far less noticable as their actions as equally as desperate the short’s entire pace. All of this really grounds us in Poison’s sense of building tension, which results in a literal physical jump into handheld camera. Every creative decision revolving around staged aspects in this particular short, feels clearly designed to invest us more in this story, rather than distance us.

It feels with each new Wes Anderson work, he begins to look more like himself, which somehow becomes less and less easy to define. I’d argue this is for the better. It’s refreshing to think that with a style as distinctive as Anderson’s, he’s always willing to play with how it lands.