Even some of Wes Anderson’s most die-hard fans were put off by his 2021 film The French Dispatch, with its three-story structure and stilted, self-conscious evocation of literary France. Anderson hasn’t changed his storytelling technique in the slightest for his new film Asteroid City, which has premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, but his recent detractors will be relieved nonetheless: this is his most enrapturing feature since The Grand Budapest Hotel nearly a decade ago.
As in many of Anderson’s films, the plot comes with multiple framing devices. We first see Bryan Cranston in black and white as an Edward R Murrow-esque TV host who introduces us to an earnest playwright called Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), who is working on the story we are about to watch. Asteroid City, then, is a film within a play within a TV show, or something like that. It is, we are told early on, an “apocryphal fabrication” – and it even has an optional intermission.
