Moonrise Kingdom, Cannes Film Festival - review

Wes Anderson offers a charming and beautifully filmed parable of young love
1/4
17 May 2012

Opening the proceedings at Cannes is not always a privilege. Often the festival selects a film that has a good reason to be out of the competition.

This year, however, Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom not only opens the 65th festival but is also in the contest.

It is the first of his seven features to reach Cannes, despite his fame as an unusually original American director (The Royal Tenenbaums, Fantastic

Mr Fox etc), and is a charming and beautifully filmed if rather lightweight fable about pre-teen love.

Set on an island off the coast of New England in the summer of 1965, its two lovers are Jared Gilman’s Sam and Kara Hayward’s Susie. He is a Scout at Camp Ivanhoe and during one breakfast time Edward Norton’s disciplinarian troop leader finds him missing from his tent. He leaves behind a polite letter of resignation and it appears he has a secret pact with Susie, also aged 12, to run away into the wilderness.

Everyone on the island is highly shocked and starts quarrelling about the disappearance and their part in it. But then, they decide, Sam is an orphan with foster parents who don’t really like him very much and is thought to be psychologically damaged in some way.

As for the girl, her parents (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand) seem to be hiding some sort of secret which Tilda Swinton, brought in as the island’s social services representative in a ludricous uniform and hat, tries to fathom.

There is also Bruce Willis as the sheriff, who says most runaways are found in six days and not to worry. But troop leader Norton does worry and sends his boys out into the bush armed and ready to recapture the pair.

However, when an arrow is fired, it only kills the sniffer dog and the lovers escape, apparently with the collusion of some of the chasing boys. In the end, the film develops into a kind of parable about the purity of young love and the way, in adulthood, it all seems to go wrong.

One of the chief pleasures of the movie is the Benjamin Britten music, which constantly emphasises that this is no ordinary entertainment but one with more delicacy than Hollywood could aspire to.

This is an adult film about children rather than a children’s film, per se. Youngsters should, however, love it and their parents be pleased they’ve seen it too. Very rare, that.

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