Pictureland

Think pink.  Welcome to the Grand Budapest.   Popular this year in Andersonia:  mustaches, the colors purple and pink...and yet more mustaches. Continuing to trend very well:  uniforms, exotic names and art direction so inlaid with detail and saturated with color to produce retinal overload or high blood sugar.  Or both.  If mise-en-scene be the food of love, give me surfeit of it! one might say...if one happened to wander off the set of Twelfth Night and onto the set of Wes Anderson's latest film, where the forgetting of one's lines, not to mention connection to life on planet Earth would be quite understandable. It is the fictional European Alpine state of Zubrowka in which G rand Budapest Hotel is set.  But make no mistake:  we're deep, deep in the heart of Andersonia.  Perhaps deeper than we have yet been, we brave souls who have witnessed all eight of the director's feature-length films.  Yet only eight?  Can that be...

Like the Fendi and Raf Simons (Jil Sander) fashions in which its characters are adorned, I Am Love is positively draped in elegance.  The opening title sequence alone, a combination of lush cursive and cooly modern print over scenes of snowy Milan, urged along by the crisp, insistent rhythms of John Adams, is like an appetizer so rich you're not sure that you even need an entree.      Before big, black letters announced, "MILANO," I initially wondered if those wintry images might be of some modern Russian city, perhaps the home of I Am Love's main character, Emma Recchi (the ever-singular Tilda Swinton).  But this is not sundrenched Tuscany, rather the darker, colder northern Italian center of fashion and commerce.   As is the case with all representations of both nature and weather we see, frigid Milan mirrors the emotional winter in which Emma is living.   I A...