Mise-en-scene is one of those academic terms that has never quite made sense to me. I’m convinced that on no film set has one ever uttered the word “mise-en-scene” because it’s not strictly speaking, a technical term. Bordwell and Thompson dissect the term into a few different categories.
As a self confessed Anderson fan, this isn’t my first time studying his artistic sensibilities. His use of focal length and symmetry is particularly fascinating. Audiences may not be able to put their finger on what exactly creates that sense of artifice but there’s something unnatural about shooting with a wide-angle lens, a foot away from an actors face rather than a more conventional portrait focal length and distance.
Wes Anderson’s Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is a masterpiece of Mise-en-scene. In terms of Setting (the first element of mies-en-scene), the film is relatively minimalistic (the theatre location, the islands, the Belafonte and Operation Hennessey). Anderson’s style is intentionally artificial. Anderson constructs the Belafonte in one of the scenes is as a huge diorama over 100 feet in length.
Costume in Life Aquatic is similarly important as contrast is a key aspect of the film’s costumes. The Belafonte crew wear powder blue pants and matching tops with a bright red cap, each character wearing the cap and the uniform in slightly varying ways. This is juxtaposed with the Hennessy sailors and the extraneous people aboard the belafonte in khaki clothing which directly clashes with the blue uniforms.
Wes Anderson very rarely uses shadow in Life Aquatic. Most shots in the film are lit in a very flat manor and are also lit naturally which contrasts with the very artificial use of setting, costume, makeup and cinematography. The use of 3-point lighting is very minimal, more often, Anderson and his crew use available natural light and means to manipulate light (reflectors, diffusers etc.)
When it comes to the staging of the film, Anderson very deliberately places talent within a scene to again create a very staged feeling. Probably the best example of Staging Mise-en-scene is the submarine scene in which each of the cast members are placed perfectly in the shot so that they are almost all visible in the frame despite how packed they are within the scene.
Aside from the very obvious aspects of mise-en-scene, Wes Anderson very deliberately manipulates space and time, most obviously space with mise-en-scene. The almost constant use of wide angle lenses distorts the space to give the audience a broader view than they would normally have, allowing Anderson to fill the frame with elements of mise-en-scene, even moreso than many directors of this time.