CHRISTIE PITS Park
Sunday, july 13, 2025

The Royal Tenenbaums

With the short films Life Doesn't Frighten Me and The Skates

Wes Anderson’s films are often characterized as mannerist exercises in pure style, meticulously constructed theatrical worlds empty of real emotion. This misses the point: the flat affect of his characters and the elaborate settings reflect their repressed emotions and inability to cope with tragedy, but their stories are deeply affecting. Anderson’s career-making The Royal Tenenbaums exemplifies this tendency. The tragicomedy charts the reluctant reunion of a famous, dysfunctional family of formerly-gifted, emotionally immature adult children, their scheming father, their distant mother, and a variety of friends and hangers-on at their derelict New York mansion. The stellar cast includes co-writer Owen Wilson and his real life brother Luke, Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelica Huston, Danny Glover, Bill Murray, and of course the late, great Gene Hackman in perhaps his most charmingly roguish role. Certainly, the film is immaculately styled, shot, and cut (with a memorable soundtrack to boot), but we defy the audience not to tear up during the climactic scenes.

Taking stylistic and emotional cues from Anderson, Newfoundland-born Stephen Dunn’s short film Life Doesn’t Frighten Me tells the story of young Esther Weary’s fateful thirteenth birthday. Confronted with the painful realities of adolescence and, making matters worse, her first period, she has nowhere else to turn but her clueless grandfather (the late Canadian icon Gordon Pinsent) and his affectionate pet pug. The film features music from Sufjan Stevens and an incredible Andersonian hand-crafted credit sequence. Rounding out this programme of family tragicomedy, Montréal-based Moroccan-Swiss filmmaker Halima Ouardiri’s short The Skates follows a teenage girl whose budding interest in figure skating, encouraged by her mother, is undermined by her emotionally manipulative father in an acrimonious battle between her divorced parents. The Skates is one of the films highlighted in this year’s Spotlight on SWANA Stories programme.

This screening will be presented with optional pre-recorded Audio Description available for blind, low vision, or visually impaired audience members. More information about this accessibility feature is available at TOpictureshow.com/audio. Other accessibility features available at TOPS events, including open captioning, are outlined at TOpictureshow.com/accessibility.