Where do you stand on the films of Wes Anderson? For this writer, it’s a hit and miss affair. For every Fantastic Mr Fox, there’s also an Asteroid City. For every Grand Budapest Hotel, there’s a Royal Tenenbaums (you can fight me on this one). Star casting and arresting performances aside, when the films are more than simply arch and mannered curios, but take deeper dives into character and narrative, they’re right up there. Otherwise… not so much.
The constant though is the look. That carefully curated, exceptionally well production designed presentation in which location and set are everything… even to the detriment of the rest of the film, it could be argued. Accidentally Wes Anderson (AWA) began as a bucket list for travellers who are captivated by the aesthetic of Anderson’s films and are regularly on the hunt for real life striking locations that look as if they could have come straight from an Anderson movie.
The filmmaker himself provided the foreword for Wally Koval’s book of the same name, which brings many of the resulting images together in one place. And now the whole thing has mushroomed, with travelling exhibitions, shops and books exploring the concept and giving a home to a global community of lovers of the Anderson imagery. You can even access a map pinpointing the locations of these Anderson-like buildings and locations from across the entire planet.
The exhibition component has now reached Melbourne with a series of rooms in the city’s CBD displaying select photographs from the project against an Anderson-inspired backdrop, replete with the several appropriate objects or settings.
The exhibition isn’t large – a handful of rooms and around 200 photographs – but the studied quirkiness of the images actually becomes a little familiar after the first room or two. Think plenty of chocolate box hotel façades and block colours. To enhance the experience and make it feel a little more 3D, there is the odd artefact – a desk with a vintage orange typewriter, a pair of old waterskis attached to a boat shed door, a lifeguard station, a yellow telescope or a railroad crossing sign – and these do add to the ambience. As do the brightly coloured or papered walls housing the the framed photographs.
Perhaps for locals though, it’s the Melbourne room that will resonate most strongly, offering images of the city’s very own arresting landmarks, such as Luna Park, the Docklands’ cow up a tree, the beloved Palais or the glorious Art Deco building in Clifton Hill that now, sadly, houses a fast food restaurant, though its magnificence remains undiminished. There’s something rather cheering, and not a little pride inducing, about seeing them lined up against equally evocative images from around the world.
Read: Exhibition review: The Art World Came to Us: Macquarie Galleries, Ngununggula
Oh and there’s always the photo-me booth and fairy floss cart to add to the entertainment factor if the images alone don’t suffice.
Accidentally Wes Anderson is at 1st Floor, 360 Bourke Street, Melbourne CBD, until 3 November 2024. Tickets from $21-$29.
