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Journalists are the heroes of “The French Dispatch”, so expect movie critics to be a bit biased in their endorsement of Wes Anderson’s latest. It flatters the pitch, after all, but not in the same way that Pulitzer-centric “All the President’s Men” or “Spotlight” mega-scoop sagas may have done before. Anderson is more of a miniaturist, though his vision grows larger – and more impressive – with each successive project.
Here, the Texas Registry in Paris sets out to honor the New Yorker and his ilk, recreating the joy of getting lost in a 12,000-word (or three) article on the big screen while handing the whole affair over to his adoptive parent. . home. Set in the fictional town of Ennui-sur-Blasé – a cross between Paris and Angoulême frozen in time (where most of the exteriors were shot) – the film offers an expat view of France, presented in the form from a series of clips from the eponymous publication.
What does this mean exactly? Well, this is an anthology film, consisting of an “obituary, a travel guide and three in-depth articles”. So while there is no overall narrative or overlap between the segments, Anderson is clearly the author of the five – as there is no living filmmaker with a more recognizable visual signature, and every image of “The French Dispatch” is undoubtedly his. Thus, the unconventional project succeeds in offering this very particular hodgepodge pleasure of reading a well-organized issue from cover to cover.
At first glance, the obituary is that of the former founder and publisher of French Dispatch, Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Bill Murray). He was a man of many maxims (including “Just try to make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose” and “Don’t cry”) who could spot and champion talent in an unlikely form, even if that meant getting out of jail. someone he believed to be a budding writer, like Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright), a James Baldwin-style dandy who recites every line of a wild and insane kidnapping story by heart.
Journalists today are meant to be moral, honest citizens with perfect grammar and even more impeccable ethics, but that couldn’t be less true of the Howitzer crew. They regard “journalistic neutrality” as senseless vanity, injecting itself into their own tracks on purpose. Frances McDormand stars as Lucinda Krementz, a Mavis Gallant from the film, which reports on the student protests of May 1968 in the central segment mostly in black and white. She is understandably intrigued by the young radical Zeffirelli B. (Timothée Chalamet), but rather than stay away, she takes her virginity and improves her manifesto. on the pillow (or “on the pillow”, as the French say so nicely).
It’s also political that things get here, although compared to the rest of Anderson’s work – which usually falls somewhere between the whimsical and the twee – it’s a significant step up to see the director s engage in sexuality and violence as aspects of real life. Yes, there is still an ironic distance between such elements and the audience, but “The French Dispatch” feels less secure than Anderson’s earlier work, and that’s a good thing.
“I assure you it’s erotic,” insists cultural hawk JKL Berensen (Tilda Swinton) in “The Concrete Masterpiece,” a profile presented as a high-end art lecture devoted to modern art bad boy Moses Rosenthaler (a bestial Benicio del Toro), a condemned Killer who has found his muse (prison guard Léa Seydoux) in confinement. From the way Rosenthaler gushes, it’s fair to imagine that this rarefied intellectual may have been seduced by more than her artistic genius – which is a very subversive way of parodying the late and still as apt historian of The Eye. Rosamond Bernier.
The film is full of jokes for audiences connected to the arts and culture scene of the 50s and 60s in New York and Paris. At the time, a large number of American designers jumped across the Atlantic, in pursuit of the glory of the lost generation of Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, and found a city that embraced the returning avant-garde. at their home. Nationalism is now on the rise across Europe, but in Anderson’s France the pen is still more powerful than Le Pen. Director refuses to say anything too controversial about French politics yesterday or today, mocking value judgments enfant terrible) and personal causes (Zeffirelli fights for free access to the women’s dormitory, rather than taking a stand against imperialism).
Anderson’s characters may be caricatures of serious writers, and yet the tone of the film is more consistent with the comedic contributors to The New Yorker: the James Thurber cartoons, the absurdity of Woody Allen, the treatment. Steve Martin’s satiric of artists, critics and other cultural charlatans. Where “The Grand Budapest Hotel” was a tribute to a single writer, Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig, “The French Dispatch” is Anderson’s open-arms tribute to a generation of complicated geniuses, so that The eye is as dense and dizzying as The Guilty Pleasure movie references do in a Quentin Tarantino image.
It can be fun to play detective when presented with such a collage, but “The French Dispatch” is a first-class pastiche, and as such all of these influences have been recombined into something new and exciting. original. That’s good news for those who aren’t longtime readers of The New Yorker, as this collection of squirrel shorts is meant to be self-sufficient. In the past, the director has been accused of making dollhouse movies that are too artificial, and as he rehearses many of his favorite tricks – playing with proportions, centering characters in symmetrical compositions, revealing a tall building. in intricate cross section – this time it makes it look like there’s a solid world swarming beyond the carefully controlled edges of the frame.
From the start, we are told that The French Dispatch is a satellite publication “of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun” (as much is said in lowercase under the title), which reminds us that this festival of Francophile love stems from a more or less Midwestern state of mind. Anderson knows that when you’ve never been to Paris, even prostitutes and pickpockets seem sophisticated, and that everything from beret to baguette can sound funny – not to mention tongue twisters like “grunts” or a slightly stilted accent. . When the characters speak French, the subtitles are so strange and arranged that the movie seems to challenge you to read them.
Aside from Ernst Lubitsch or Jacques Tati, it’s hard to imagine another director who put so much effort into creating a comedy, where every choice of costume, prop and casting was made with meaning. of absurdity as reverent. If that sounds airless or exhausting, think again: sure, it takes work to unbox, but the set makes sure that Anderson’s humorous creations are human. Atop the mast – and indulgent godfather to his staff – Murray remembers not only the New Yorker editors Ross and Wallace Shawn, but also the great HL Mencken, who encouraged writers like John Fante, subsisting on pennies and pennies. orange peels, to find their voice.
Frivolous as it all sounds, Anderson is right to celebrate a generation that broadened our idea of what storytelling could be, shaping more than journalism: they found poetry on the streets and heroes on the fringes; they defied the establishment and represented a new wave just as influential as the one sweeping cinema at the same time. Today, chasing web traffic and popular trends, the domain has arguably moved in the wrong direction, which is more than justifying a toast to those wretched ink-stained wretches who once followed their instincts.
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