Moonrise Kingdom

Being an adult is to forget that the games of children, with their shared rules, their imaginary scenarios and their plastic guns, are a very serious thing. Fortunately for all, Wes Anderson, the same author who eleven years ago introduce us to The Royal Tenenbaums, never became an adult and his films have kept the atmosphere from a fantasy world built during school break.

Suzy and Sam are a pair of children who run away from home to find a secret beach on an island, like the fairy tale in which they live. While the rest of the characters of the movie are looking for them, Wes Anderson, this time in his role as writer (role shared with Roman Coppola and for which they were nominated for an Oscar) needs to explain how consolidated the relationship between the kids is. To do this, the scene that best captures the spirit of this movie is displayed: through very agile editing, the life of the children, narrated by them as they wrote it in their letters,  plays on their backs, like a presentation given to an audience which happens to be us.

Another great element are the dialogues, short and very well allocated: they are built so that we need to fill in the blaks with our imagination. There is also that picky care about the details of settings and costumes, that makes each shot static or at the most very gentle with its movements, so that it seems like a frame in a wall. As always, it is photography that gives that unique look to the Anderson's movies: in this case, the look of pale wooden toys painted by hand, complementing the feeling of unreality that never abandons us as we watch Moonrise Kingdom.

Around Suzy and Sam there are some extraordinary characters, the usual inhabitants of Wes Anderson's films: adults who are a bit lost in their lives, still children and innocent, that never quite feel comfortable in the world. And so we have Suzy's mother who lives an affair with the police chief of the island; or the scout commander gracefully played by Edward Norton, in charge of Sam in his camp and therefore directly responsible for what may happen.

Those adults who never finished growing up are typical characters in Anderson's films, but here they are only extras to the wonderful children who are discovering what it means to mature. In this way, the movie becomes a splendid declaration of love to a lost era; to that childhood in which we were kings of our own fantasy islands; a time when we still did not know how hard our first romance would be and how suddenly we would find ourselves, without asking for it, turned into teenagers.

Director: Wes Anderson

Writers: Wes Anderson, Roman Coppola

Stars: Jared Gilman, Kara Hayward, Bruce Willis