On view at Fondazione Prada’s Nord gallery, the undertaking features a number of authentic units, props, miniatures, costumes, and artworks featured on this film, which premiered within the 2023 Cannes Movie Competition. These immersive installations transport audiences into the inventive universe of Anderson’s eleventh function movie. Asteroid Metropolis takes place in 1955 in a fictional American desert city well-known for its meteor crater and celestial observatory. It narrates a conference of younger astronomers and area cadets, bringing collectively college students and fogeys from throughout the nation and spectacularly disrupted by mysterious occasions that can change the world.

Two years after The French Dispatch (2021), Wes Anderson returns to the massive display screen with a movie that mixes science fiction with the spirit of Broadway and during which we discover the stylistic options which have established the American auteur’s worldwide status. The movie, of extraordinary plastic energy and compositional sophistication, boasts a stellar ensemble forged that includes, amongst others, Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Liev Schreiber, and Hope Davis. Asteroid Metropolis satirically evokes collective (the atomic bomb) and particular person (loneliness) fears and additional develops the American director’s authentic and refined poetics.

As commented by Wes Anderson, “My private want is likely to be to have each prop and costume we ever made for all our films transferred into the Fondazione Prada to stay there indefinitely forever (if they may spare us the area). Rem Koolhaas additionally designed one among my very favourite cinemas on this planet proper in the midst of it.”

Asteroid Metropolis could be thought-about an uncommon mixture of Western and Sci-fi films that traverses the sentiments of grief and loss. The blinding brightness of its cinematography contrasts with the exhibition’s mysterious and darker environment, permitting the viewers to expertise a number of the film’s deeper themes extra intensely. The present transfers the movie’s fictional panorama and environments into an actual, bodily area. It’s a backward journey during which the units and numerous ornamental parts, particularly conceived and realized for a cinematographic manufacturing, regain their materiality, confronting the guests’ bodily presence, who substitute the actors and the crew initially featured in these environments.

Asteroid Metropolis was filmed in Spain, on the outskirts of Chinchón, a small centre within the Group of Madrid. The units have been designed by longtime Anderson collaborator Adam Stockhausen (Oscar® winner for The Grand Budapest Lodge, 2014). For Anderson and Stockhausen, a major inspiration for the look of the panorama and the city areas was Unhealthy Day at Black Rock, the 1955 movie directed by John Sturges and starring Spencer Tracy. Different key design references included Billy Wilder’s Ace within the Gap (1951) and Kiss Me, Silly (1964), in addition to Frank Capra’s basic It Occurred One Evening (1934). The buildings and their interiors, all panorama parts—together with mountains, boulders, and rocks—which spectators see on the display screen, have been all bodily constructed on an enormous scale and specified by a method that gave the actors and crew the sense of dwelling in an actual, completely functioning city.

In Fondazione Prada’s Nord gallery, chosen surroundings parts are organized in unbiased installations, every of which refers to a key scene from the movie in an order that follows its plot nearly faithfully. Every exhibition part is related to an audio monitor extracted from the linked scene. Nonetheless, the exhibition path provides guests the chance to invent their autonomous narrative, transferring freely between the assorted sequences of the exhibition and the movie.

Detailed units and authentic props on show embody the miniaturized mannequin freight prepare that cuts via the desert, humorous pastel-coloured merchandising machines stocked with snacks, cigarettes, drinks and ammunition for the Asteroid Metropolis inhabitants, the phone sales space, billboards, flags, avenue indicators, artworks, and most of the characters’ costumes, equipment and different objects—like books, hand-written notebooks and musical devices—, organized along with set items to recreate sequences from the movie. Additionally on view are the Roadrunner and the Alien puppets conceived by Andy Gent, who collaborated with Anderson for Isle of Canine (2018) and Implausible Mr Fox (2009).

“Wes Anderson – Asteroid Metropolis: Exhibition” interprets the movie language into a brand new inventive medium. It permits for a deeper studying of advanced topics about human existence and numerous American political and social beliefs that run via the director’s imaginative and prescient. Fondazione Prada’s exhibition offers a uncommon alternative to discover the filmmaking course of in its concreteness and inventiveness and analyze cinema storytelling from an up-close and unprecedented perspective.

at Fondazione Prada, Milano
till January 7, 2024