American exotic

By Tom Shone

Who would like to see a really good film about America? One of the chief virtues of being carpet-bombed by American movies used to be seeing what the country had been up to lately—how the old girl was shaping up. She's been a little absent from view of late. Sure, we get to see a generic New York smashed to smithereens every summer, but the giant vistas that once haunted John Ford, or the jittery streets that kept Martin Scorsese up at night, seem to have faded from the big screen. Woody Allen sends postcards home from London, Madrid, Rome; even Scorsese went Parisian for "Hugo", while the hip young auteurs circle the globe, collecting hosannahs from the festival circuit. Wes Anderson’s latest picture, "Moonrise Kingdom", is his first set on American soil in a decade.

We’ll always have the Coens, of course, quietly stitching together a patchwork quilt of their country—New York in the 1950s ("The Hudsucker Proxy"), Los Angeles in the 1940s ("Barton Fink"), Mississippi in the 1930s ("O Brother, Where Art Thou?"), Minnesota in the 1960s ("A Serious Man"), Arkansas in the 1880s ("True Grit"), their quirky charm resting in their ability to see their country from the outside—strangers in their own land. Something of that mixture enlivens "Beasts of the Southern Wild". Made on a shoestring by a resourceful New Orleans-based collective, and directed by 29-year-old Benh Zeitlin, this film came out of nowhere to snatch the Grand Jury prize at Sundance and the Caméra d'Or at Cannes, and rightly so. It is easily the most original American film of 2012 so far.