Just in time for the Austin-based Circuit of the Americas F1 race, Wes Anderson has a free eight-minute short film about a race car driver streaming for free on YouTube. The film—”Castello Cavalcanti”—is set in 1955 and stars Anderson regular Jason Schwartzman as a last-place driver from America who crashes his car in his ancestral home in Italy.
The presence of Schwartzman isn’t the only indication that you’re watching a Wes Anderson film. The director, whose stylized visual palette utilizes a few recurring tricks (saturated colors, miniature versions of things, ill-advised facial hair, bright yellow jumpsuits), makes his mark clear over the film’s eight-minute runtime.
The film was financed by Prada, and maybe one could call it a commercial—it features the Prada logo prominently at one point—but it plays out more like a piece from the director’s sketchbook. It’s not necessarily a fully-realized idea, but it’s short and it doesn’t cost you anything to watch, so why not take a glimpse at what intrigues one of the more distinctive Texas filmmakers?
