Wes Anderson's artifice reveals itself here in all the tricks of the Mélièsian director-illusionist: the destruction (rather than breaking) of the fourth wall, the stage wings that move like a theater transparent in synchronized movement of which it is possible to see the dramaturgical mechanisms, the actors who become characters-objects, elements too, who speak of themselves as omniscient narrators but also as immersed presences. We are inside the hat from which the magician will soon take the rabbit out.
But something escapes this operation of metacinematic revelation, and it is precisely the driving force of the action, the incipit and therefore the epilogue, the archè philosophical, why we are seeing everything that is happening on the screen. As if Wes Anderson led us to discover the how, but never the cause and purpose of that absurd world, where as in this case a very poisonous snake decided to rest on its abdomen, freezing bodies, expressions and therefore in a metacinematic sense performance actors with a few very limited facial signs (again primordial as silent cinema teaches us to do), whispered telegraphic words that become diegetic background sound so as not to disturb the silent sleeping of the reptile (or the silent racist feeling).
Poison becomes the summa not only of all 4 short films taken from Roald Dahl's legacy, but perhaps of Anderson's entire (last) work, because it clarifies his intentions, shows the magic of cinematography, the illusion still possible in that verbose and saturated world to which he has accustomed us with all his latest films (Asteroid City docet). Where it seems that Wes Anderson has lost the passion, the empathy, the literary divertissement to become a dull copy of himself, in Poison he tells us that something has indeed changed, but the the spell persists for those who can still see it, for those who know that that snake exists under the sheet even if it cannot be seen, for those who, as in The Little Prince, still see a boa digesting an elephant instead of the classic and boring hat.
