The French Dispatch (2021)
dir. Wes Anderson
Rated: R
image: ©2021 Searchlight Pictures
The subtitle of The French Dispatch could have been: Wes Anderson makes me feel bad about myself. Modern (useless) Facebook meme pop-psychology would tell me that no one but me is responsible for the way I feel about myself. And yet. As someone who tries to move through the world with a reputation of being a cinephile, it took me watching about 20 minutes of Mr. Anderson’s new film to realize (as I do when I watch any of the director’s other films) how little I really know about this art form that I claim to cherish.
That mental self-flagellation, though – brought on by the certainty that there are dozens, if not hundreds, of visual homages to (in this case, French) cinema tucked into every corner of the film – is worth the experience of watching it. For every ten references that sailed right over my head, there was one that landed, reminding me of Anderson’s visual playfulness and his mastery over the art form and it’s long, rich history.
The first of those revelatory moments comes in the opening minutes of the film. We watch, from street level, as a character makes his way up the floors of a building using staircases we can see through arches and windows. It’s a re-creation of an inspired bit from French comedy director Jacques Tati’s splendid Mon Oncle. I adore Tati’s work – especially his meticulous, epic-scale farce masterpiece Playtime. In Anderson’s erudite hands, the fleeting moment, like the rest of his film, is a re-creation of a bygone filmmaking era, expertly staged and lovingly crafted.
There’s an acute sense of nostalgia at play in The French Dispatch, as was the case for Anderson’s 2014 film The Grand Budapest Hotel. It’s not a cloying, childish nostalgia, though. The film recognizes that while things might have been better in the past, Anderson’s dazzling style builds upon what’s come before it to create something wholly original and exciting; it’s a piece of art that ultimately looks to the future by honoring what’s come before it.
The French Dispatch is an anthology film centered around a publication of the same name which operates as a foreign bureau of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun. The paper’s editor, Arthur Howitzer Jr., who was inspired to launch the paper in 1925 during a trip to France, has died of a sudden heart attack. As was his dying wish, The French Dispatch will cease publication immediately following a farewell issue featuring an obituary of its founder and a reprinting of three articles from the paper’s previous editions.
Anderson – with help on the story from frequent collaborators Roman Coppola, Hugo Guinness, and Jason Schwartzman – can’t bring himself to spend a single frame of screen time in the here and now. With The Grand Budapest Hotel, that picture’s brief bookends are set in the present, before the film rushes off to the 1980s (also briefly), ‘60s, and ‘30s. In The French Dispatch, the bookends are set in the mid-1970s, and the bulk of the story takes place in the 1950s and ‘60s.
The pervasive sense in the film of melancholy for the past is exemplified in the very name of the French village where Howitzer has set up shop: Ennui. (In a further joke and play on the sensibilities of the French filmmakers he’s honoring, like Godard and Truffaut, the full name of the town is Ennui-sur-Blasé, or Boredom-on-Blasé.)
After the introduction to Howitzer and his life-long professional ethos, wherein he surrounded himself with writers – “These were his people,” Angelica Houston’s unnamed narrator tells us – we get a tour of Ennui. In a hilarious cameo by Anderson repertory-company regular Owen Wilson, we see comparison shots of Ennui’s past and present (the present being, within the world of the movie, the 1970s). There’s a droll melancholy in Wilson’s observation that the Ennui of the film’s present is an echo of its former greatness. The people and attitudes have changed, even as the locations themselves have remained much the same.
Then Anderson takes us on a tour of that former greatness through three stories of The French Dispatch’s earlier editions. Each entry features a delightfully oddball story and cast of characters brimming with Andersonian eccentricities. The meticulous and exacting mise-en-scène, camera movements, and character quirks we’ve come to expect from the director are utterly charming.
The first story, “The Concrete Masterpiece”, concerns a criminally insane artist who becomes a modern-art sensation when he begins painting abstract interpretations of a female prison guard while serving a sentence for murder. The most thrilling moments here come with a series of tableaux vivants that capture scenes of chaos during a prison riot. Anderson slowly dollies his camera from left to right, or vice versa, as everyone in the frame holds as still as possible. The playfulness of the “still shot” sequences come when you notice the actors move, almost imperceptibly, while trying to hold their poses.
There’s also a standout bit of editing that conjures a fascinating reworking of the standard shot-reverse-shot most often used for conversations between two characters. The exchange is between Moses Rosenthaler, the incarcerated artist, and his muse, the prison guard Simone. The two of them lie on their backs in opposite directions, with their heads next to one another. The camera captures them from above, flipping which head is upside down and which is right-side up depending on who is speaking.
I have to imagine both the still shot tableaux and the radical shot-reverse-shot technique are inspired by one French New Wave film or another, but I’ll be damned if I know which one. My consternation at not having done my homework couldn’t concern me for long, however, because I was swept away by the beauty of Anderson’s filmmaking.
Benicio del Toro is simultaneously menacing and comical as Rosenthaler; Léa Seydoux is icily hypnotic as Simone. Adrien Brody is officious and smarmy as Julien Cadazio, the art dealer who, after serving a sentence for tax evasion alongside Rosenthaler, turns the homicidal artist into a sensation. Tilda Swinton is gloriously over the top as J.K.L. Berensen, the French Dispatch staff writer who brings the story of Rosenthaler to Dispatch readers.
The performances featured in the second story, “Revisions to a Manifesto”, are utterly delightful. Frances McDormand plays Lucinda Krementz, a Dispatch correspondent who ditches her journalistic detachment – if there is such a thing – when she begins a brief affair with her subject, the leader of a 1960s student revolt against the establishment named Zeffirelli. Timothée Chalamet’s performance as the self-serious and hopelessly naïve Zeffirelli is the most fun the actor has ever had on screen. Chalamet’s comedic timing is impeccable, and he never lets the farce of the proceedings swallow up what his character sees as the immeasurably high stakes of the situation. The unexpected death of one of the characters grounds this middle section of the film in the deep melancholy which Anderson wields with expert precision.
Anderson further mixes styles and aesthetics in the last extended vignette of the movie, “The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner.” As in Grand Budapest Hotel, the director cuts inexplicably to a delightful animated sequence for a chase scene. In Grand Budapest, it’s a chase on snow sleds. Here, it’s cars, as the Police Commissioner tries to rescue his kidnapped son. Along the way, we meet Lt. Nescaffier, a police officer-cum-chef (or is it the other way round?) who uses his superior cooking skills in the race to save Gigi, the kidnapped son of the Commissioner.
Jeffrey Wright continues to prove he’s one of the best actors working today with his portrayal of Roebuck Wright, the Dispatch food journalist whose piece for the publication barely covers the culinary aspects of the story. The character Wright recounts the zany events on a ‘70s talk show, and actor Wright telegraphs his character’s unspoken sense that his tale is rooted in a more vital, exciting by-gone era.
Anderson has called The French Dispatch a “love letter to journalists.” His fictional paper is an homage to The New Yorker; the character Howitzer is based on Harold Ross, The New Yorker’s co-founder. Between the influence of French cinema history on the film’s aesthetics and its tribute to historic figures in journalism – Roebuck Wright is based on both James Baldwin and A. J. Liebling – it would have been easy for Anderson’s movie to get bogged down in the past. But the director’s sui generis style and vision make his obsession with the greatness of recent history as vital as what’s happening in the here and now.
Why it got 4 stars:
- The French Dispatch is probably Wes Anderson’s most convoluted, esoteric films to date, but that added to its charm for me. This is definitely a movie that will blossom more and more with each repeat viewing.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- To my point above, in my notes, taken while watching the movie, I jotted “too many notes…ha!” I was referencing Emperor Joseph II in Amadeus when he offers a critique of the musical prodigy’s work. There are A LOT of notes here, but it ultimately makes for a richer experience.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Seen on a Friday night at Alamo Drafthouse. The theater was between half- and three-quarters-full.