Log

Plenty of familiar territory here:

As the film says – “The past happened.  But it’s over now, isn’t it?”   “Not for us.” – and shows – (Renoir’s color, Ray’s music, Anderson’s dioramic, wide-angle frontalities) – the marks of the past are inescapable.

Which makes it possible to overlook quiet, tentative gestures of discovery.  Here in the dining car Owen Wilson sits talking in telephoto amongst an extraordinary palette of skins, textiles, and surfaces reflective and translucent.

Between these two points the camera abandons its tracks, its deadpan assuredness, and merely drifts toward its destination. Even the zoom halfway through is subtle, delicate, nearly indistinguishable from (or perhaps simultaneous with) the wobbling walk forward.  The technique forms one minor component of the film’s dialectic of the obvious (the scars, the luggage) and the indirect:  

Genuine moments of revelation alongside those sought after, declared, and missed in earnest irony.