
Tickets for London's epic new Wes Anderson exhibition are now on sale
Film lovers, this is one for you: a landmark Wes Anderson exhibition is coming to London later this year, and it looks genuinely quite brilliant. But you're going to want to act fast: tickets have now gone on sale, and we expect them to sell pretty fast.
As the director's first-ever retrospective, 'Wes Anderson: The Archives' at the Design Museum will feature more than 600 items from the filmmaker's back catalogue: costumes, storyboards, sketches, props, motion puppets, handwritten notebooks and the three-metre wide model of The Grand Budapest Hotel which was used to capture the building's façade for the iconic 2014 film.
You'll have the chance to see all sorts of recognisable stuff up close – like vending machines from Asteroid City and the FENDI fur coat worn by Gwyneth Paltrow as Margot Tenenbaum in The Royal Tenenbaums. There will also be a rare screening of Anderson's 1993 Bottle Rocket 14-minute short film that went on to be remade as his first feature.
If you fancy it, tickets are priced from £19.69 and the exhibition opens in November, running through to July next year.
Tim Marlow, Director and CEO of the Design Museum, said: 'Wes Anderson has created some of the most visually distinctive and emotionally resonant films of the last two decades — from the melancholic charm of The Royal Tenenbaums to the youthful adventurism of Moonrise Kingdom.
'He's an utterly compelling creator of cinematic worlds, whose singular vision and attention to detail are underpinned by an acute understanding of design and craftsmanship, which is why the Design Museum is the perfect location for this landmark retrospective.'
The exhibition premiered at la Cinémathèque française in Paris in March this year. For its time in London, 100 new objects will be added and there will also be more attention directed to the 'complex process of Anderson's world-building design work and the contributions of his trusted collaborators', charting his journey from the mid-nineties right up to his 2023 short The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar.
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All the ethnic and sectarian squabbles that beleaguer these lands in the real world are magically replaced by a peaceable patchwork of aristocratic families, each with their respective toeholds. Their inflated titles mean nothing, their names allusions to the toothless dynasties once patronised by imperial overlords. The film's King Hussein refers to more than one Hashemite monarch installed by Britain and Prince Farouk to Egypt's last king. The fact that a svelte Riz Ahmed has been cast to play a character, whose real-life inspiration, King Farouk, was a worldwide celebrity infamous for his fatness, tells us everything we need to know about the distorting mirror through which Anderson reflects the history of empire. Above all, the colonial order is represented by the film's devious protagonist Anatole 'Zsa-Zsa' Korda and his visionary scheme to build railways, tunnels, canals and dams across Phoenicia. The significance of infrastructure in colonial mythology cannot be overstated. 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(There are photos of Israel's founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, as a fez-hatted law student in Istanbul.) It fell out of fashion in the postcolonial Middle East, becoming a symbol of colonial nostalgia. Sign up to Film Weekly Take a front seat at the cinema with our weekly email filled with all the latest news and all the movie action that matters after newsletter promotion Anderson positively luxuriates in that nostalgia, in the ecumenical fellowship of the fez, worn in the film by Frenchmen, Arabs, Armenians, all happily sharing cocktails. Korda appears to be Armenian (judging by the script on his birth certificate) but in a bizarre twist Korda dons the distinctive white fez and robes of Lebanon's Druze sect, just as pharaonic imagery strangely adorns Phoenician hotels: all part of the pastiche. This is history stylised beyond all proportion. It's meant to evoke the urbane world that existed under imperial rule, before the emergence of violent ethno-nationalism. 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