In addition to using uniforms and costuming in this way, Anderson is well-versed in utilising items and props to make similar thematic points, most notably in The Darjeeling Limited. The three Whitman brothers have a lot of baggage. Jack Whitman discovers part of the way through their trip that his ex-girlfriend hid a bottle of her perfume inside his suitcase during their last meeting – baggage inside baggage, a fragrant Russian doll of lingering emotions. Similarly the eldest brother, Peter, has assumed ownership of a number of his late father’s personal belongings, including his razor and a pair of prescription sunglasses, giving him not only the look, but the outlook, of his late father. That the prescription is unsuitable for him, and gives him headaches, speaks to the damage it’s doing him to retain this view.
But the film specifically draws our attention to the brothers’ literal baggage: a ten-piece Louis Vuitton luggage set which had belonged to their father and has since been divided up among the three brothers. The bags are visually striking – monogrammed with the senior Whitman’s initials and decorated with a playful animal print – and the bags could be dismissed as stylish set-dressing at best, product placement at worst. However, the luggage fulfils a larger narrative purpose. A flashback to the day of their father’s funeral shows the removal of a ‘missing’ bag from the boot of his vintage car, symbolic of a legacy of issues being passed on to them. The three haul the suitcases around India, under increasingly trying conditions, but in order to catch their train home at the end, the brothers must literally leave their baggage behind them. While somewhat on the nose, it makes for a satisfying conclusion, revealing how the trip has allowed the brothers to cast off the lingering bitterness and neuroses developed since their father’s death.
Of all of Anderson’s beautiful and functional props, there’s one from The Grand Budapest Hotel that may, most neatly, summarise his ideological project. When a wrongly-imprisoned M. Gustave requires hammers, chisels, and other implements to break out of prison, Agatha, a local baker, conceals the tools inside an assortment of delicate-looking pastries. A guard unwraps the box of pastries upon its arrival at the prison, but cannot bear to destroy them in the name of checking for contraband, so they enter undetected and unscathed.
This box of pastries is an apt metaphor for the work of Wes Anderson. When first unwrapped, the audience sees something meticulously designed and lavishly decorated, but the power of what is concealed beneath these perfectly-arranged, deceptively-deep layers may only be discovered by those willing to look beneath the surface.
Isle of Dogs is out now in selected cinemas nationwide. You may even be lucky enough to catch it at one of the special dog-friendly screenings in Dublin's Light House Cinema and Galway's Pálás.
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CinÉireann / April 2018 33