Moonrise Kingdom: Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Wes Anderson

I don’t normally do this, write singular reviews or pieces about one film. It’s not because I don’t want to, but rather because most of the films I see don’t particularly warrant it, or that the various reviews found in the newspapers and online encapsulate my thoughts, if not to the letter then in the approximate vicinity. But every so often I make an exception. (My Honours thesis, in its own way, was an elongated piece on Across The Universe, but that was kind of different again).

Back in June, at the Sydney Film Festival, I fell in love with Wes Anderson’s latest film, Moonrise Kingdom. Intrigued by his style and the oeuvre he has built up over the past eighteen years and seven feature films, I recently watched all his films, some for the first time, and it was an interesting if slightly neurotic adventure. In many ways, Moonrise Kingdom is the epitome of Anderson’s oeuvre, a kaleidoscope that refracts and refocuses his distinctive stylistic traits and thematic concerns into their most concise, most emotional – most whimsical – evocation yet.

Infinite Stories: Sydney Film Festival 2012

*** POTENTIAL SPOILER ALERT ***

Each May, the Sydney Film Festival program comes out and I trawl through it, circling films in pencil, making notes on them, trying to work out which ones I do, don’t and wouldn’t mind seeing, working out the eleven days of the festival around whatever else it is I’m doing then. For the past few years, uni got in the way of fully enjoying it properly (at all, in fact) so last year was my first year, and I thoroughly enjoyed the seven films I saw (especially Joe Wright’s Hanna, along with the symphonic expanse of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life and Tran Anh Hung’s Norwegian Wood). This year, even though there might’ve been a smaller selection of films that I was interested in, it was – on the whole – another enjoyable experience.

My first film this year was the repeat screening of the Opening Night film, Peter Templeman’s very-Sydney Not Suitable For Children – the film, so the joke goes, whose title doubles as its classification. I’m going to say straight off that it is one of the best films I’ve seen this year so far, and definitely one of the best Australian films of recent years (along with Leon Ford’s Griff The Invisible, also starring Ryan Kwanten).