Capital Celluloid 2021 — Day 48: Sat Jul 3

The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (Anderson, 2004): Prince Charles Cinema, 2.40pm


This is a 35mm presentation.

Time Out review:
'Despite its typically painstaking attentions to elaborate set dressings and assignations of quirk, The Life Aquatic meanders and stalls in its journeys with ocean explorer Steve Zissou (Bill Murray), a down-at-heel Cousteau-manqué pursuing a filmed revenge mission against the jaguar shark who devoured his best friend. Suffused with lush yet faded primary colours like a 30-year-old Kodak snap and spiced with Henry Selick’s stop-motion animations and a starry (if often idle) cast of supporting players, ‘The Life Aquatic’ is a beautifully appointed but airless dollhouse-by-the-sea, populated by wistful figurines in their matching little red caps and Team Zissou Adidas, and scored to Seu Jorge’s deckside acoustic renditions of Bowie songs in Portuguese. The movie pokes along in a manner at once listless and affable, like a series of semi-improvised outtakes that didn’t quite gel. And yet the director magically conjures emotional dividends in the film’s invigorating last moments, which wordlessly celebrate an underrated and truly Andersonian virtue: solidarity.'
Jessica Winter

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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