Criticism The French Chronicle: Wes Anderson and his manifesto against stale
In one of his series of drawings, Javi Aznarez imagines a not necessarily ghostly universe of decapitated beings who play bowling with their heads enthusiastically celebrating the poetic rigor of a well-oiled guillotine. In a specific plate, on the unreal scenery of Cadaqués where he lives and has his studio, an enraged mass of slaughtered men chases the last man standing with hair. And with a head. It draws attention and even subdues the sinister contrast between the vice of the murky, perhaps cruel, and the illuminated grace of a clear, clean and one would say even melancholic drawing.
«I like to play with the absurdity of the everyday.
Turn around the most common to dive into the mystery from there, "he says, taking a second and continuing:" On the other hand, my reference is always the past.
It is more aesthetic.
I don't like cell phones or technology ... I try to add a touch of humor to the macabre ».
Javi Aznarez speaks and, in a strange mimetic exercise, it would seem that with each step he takes he gets a little closer to the universe exactly as surprised, elegant, ordinary, melancholic and crazy as, we have arrived,
Wes Anderson
.
Yes, the director from Houston who today premieres
The French Chronicle
could well have his new inspiration in this 42-year-old native of Barcelona.
And vice versa.
Aznarez says that it was because of a friend of his wife that his work came into the hands of the American. She was not just any friend. It was about the producer
Octavia Peissel
who, in her dual role as French and American, could pass for Anderson's own best-finished fantasy. «Suddenly, I saw myself in a selection of artists alongside monsters like Sempé. Knowing that the director had seen my work I was happy, "he recalls. But the thing was to more. To much more. Suddenly, one of his most celebrated illustrations in which the small Parisian Statue of Liberty greets his huge New York sister became the master key to all doors. «They gave me a test that consisted of reinterpreting an image from the film's storyboard where the character of
Jason Schwartzman,
an illustrator, while drawing his hand surrounded by the covers of a magazine ... », says to locate the exact moment in which that drawing was born.
Than no other.
One of the covers of the magazine designed by Javi Aznarez.
Anyone who goes to the cinema today to see The French Chronicle will find themselves face to face with the consequence of those happy encounters between Aznarez's wife and her childhood friend and one statue with another. From the poster of the tape that tells the story of the closure due to death of an imaginary American magazine in the French city of Ennui-sur-Blasé (Villahastío de la Desgana) to each of the more than 30 covers of those same magazine disseminated by each of the infinite and delicate frames passing through the four headers that separate the chapters that make up the film, without forgetting a delicate portrait of
Bill Murray
(the protagonist), the drawing of the hand from before which is Aznarez's own hand or, why not, the majestic video clip that can be seen right now in any corner of Google and that
Jarvis Cocker
reinterprets
about the song
Aline
by Christophe
...
all this is the work of the headless man who is already Aznarez.
«In February 2019 I spent two weeks filming in Angouleme. I spent a whole night drawing the sets. The next day they had to shoot in the afternoon. Everybody was looking at me. He was hysterical, very nervous. Luckily the hand was already going alone, "he says just before recalling with more pleasure than precision his meeting with Bill Murray, who was walking around the set with a device where he played his own music.
«I had to help him at one point. But I tried not to disturb, "he
says. For the director, he only has words of admiration, appreciation and those things: "I wanted the illustrator's character to have a life of its own and maybe that's why he gave me so much freedom."
Be that as it may, Aznarez is clear that everything has changed. And without remedy. Gone is the past of a bad student in paid college, of boring afternoons and clueless drawings. And even further, despite being closer, an incipient and impossible career as a businessman forced by the family's refusal to study Fine Arts. He tells that one day he visited the Barcelona Comic Fair. He says that there he discovered an illustration course thanks to which he stopped "from being the last to become the happiest."
Then he traveled to Angouleme, then published in the prestigious Casterman publishing house,
then he took refuge in Cadaqués with his family and then came what came later. In other words, an enraged mass of beheaded people ready to seize the trophy from his head.
«With this work I have learned to be more precise, to look for the essence.
Everything happens so fast in Wes Anderson's films that I now force myself to be more efficient ... On the other hand, I have gone from being a rather sullen person who goes about his business to not stopping receiving calls ...
I hope I don't lose head".
Or if.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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