Having seen a few Wes Anderson movies, from the mildly amusing “Darjeeling Limited”, to the somewhat intriguing “Royal Tenenbaums”, to the downright unwatchable “Aquatic Adventures of Steve Zissou”, I did not have very high expectations of “Moonrise Kingdom”. I did expect another highly stylized drama with saturated colors, oddish characters, and improbable plots. What I did not expect was how much I would like it. What seemed overly done or forced in those other movies somehow worked in this one. It was a bit like a fairy tale. A self-contained world of childhood on the cusp of adolescence, with hapless but well-meaning adults on the fringe, set on idyllic islands at a long summer’s end. A world that draws me in. I was spellbound.
Spellbound. I just noticed this word somewhere, and kept thinking about it, was a little spellbound by it. I think that’s what art in all its forms tries to do, to spellbind its audience. The word reminded me of Moonrise Kingdom, and another example from last night: a concert by Fuzjko Hemming.
My mom introduced me to this obscure artist with a strange life story – she’s half Swedish, half Japanese, and came back from being deaf. An eighty-year-old in eccentric outfits, she plays her classic piano pieces in her own way, with her very own special sound. Somehow she makes Chopin sound not quite Chopin, Liszt not quite Liszt, but the sound has a quality to entrance, to draw you in to this world that is Fuzjko Hemming. When the concert started at Palace of Fine Arts it became immediately apparent that this is not a good site for a concert. The sound was not projecting well from the stage, but I could hear all the other noise in the rest of the theatre, and the well ageed seats were creaking all over the place. For a couple of songs, I was rather distracted – the stifled yawns from a couple of rows behind me, a child’s whisper to the right, but most of all, the moaning seats from all directions. Then somehow I stopped being bothered by it, as I entered the zone of her music, the sound that seemed at times effervescent, that somehow tapped into my memories and evoked something… I know not what. And I was spell-bound.