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NOTo One is more faked than Wes Anderson: His scholarly manners, sonorous voiceovers, and detailed rectilinear compositions are now so familiar that parts of YouTube are overrun with Anderson pastishers, like Elvis impersonators in Vegas. . And with that over-familiarity, there was a bit of a backlash – a feeling that Wes Anderson is a boring undergraduate taste.
His new film, The French Dispatch, long delayed by Covid, has, based on the widely sorted trailer, been condemned as more of the same. What I can only say … of course, yes, more fun, more buoyancy, more elegance, more wonderfully eccentric invention, more originality. It might not be at the zenith of what it can accomplish, but for sheer moment-to-moment pleasure and for a laugh, it’s a treat.
The French Dispatch is a riff and homage to New Yorker magazine, with its legendary roster of writers, famed emphasis on standards, college office culture, distinctive cartoons and typography, metropolitan sophistication intended to a general American readership – in fact, I wonder why we haven’t noticed the New Yorker as an Anderson influence before now.
The French Dispatch itself is meant to be a special soap opera supplement to a fictional Kansas newspaper, a guide to the intellectual life of France produced at the magazine’s heyday in the late 1960s by a gallery of brilliant expatriates. Americans in the imaginary French town of Ennui. -On-Blasé – although that name is the only time comedy gets a little too broad.
The film is sort of a short story anthology, set in a postmodern Clochemerle, based on lengthy reports from its superstar writers, almost all of whom have some personal, if not sexual, involvement in what is going on, quite against ideas. boring about journalistic neutrality.
The owner and publisher is the shy, avuncular but bossy Arthur Howitzer Jr, played by Bill Murray, a figure clearly based on Harold Ross – but also, perhaps, the late Robert B Silvers of the New York Review of Books.
Tilda Swinton is art critic JKL Berensen, who tells the story of convicted murderer Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio Del Toro) for whom babysitter Simone (Léa Seydoux) plays the role of nude model and muse. Frances McDormand is Lucinda Krementz, a writer who delves into the seething revolutionary student scene of Ennui-Sur-Blasé, and ends up having an affair with her young leader Che-ish Zeffirelli (Timothée Chalamet)
And Jeffrey Wright gives a wonderfully composed performance as food writer Roebuck Wright – like James Baldwin, a gay man of color – who recounts in a television interview (a framing device granted to no one else) his attempt to interview. the head of the special police, Lieutenant Nescafier. (Stephen Park), whose job it is to provide special food to the cops, and Roebuck’s subsequent testimony on the kidnapping of the commissioner’s son (Mathieu Amalric). And, of course, the repertoire cast includes many other big names in cameo.
Mr Howitzer can be a stern builder – he fires a copier just for pretending to tell him the print deadline is approaching – but he only has two maxims: don’t cry and try to make it sound. that you wrote it that way on purpose. Perhaps these are Anderson’s watchwords, too – lack of sentimentality and deliberation. But in fact, there’s a strange wave of melancholy in the end credits, as the magazine shuts down and we’re semi-seriously invited to feel sad at the end of a non-existent post.
What does the New Yorker think of the implication that this is something out of the past? I can not imagine. But there’s certainly a lot of fun to be found in Anderson’s stunning visuals, like those of his close namesake, Roy Andersson. There are too many examples to remember, but I loved the pinball machine, called “Modern Physics”, the French cod pop star called “Tip-Top” voiced by Jarvis Cocker, and the amazing split-screen boards ” then and now “showing how parts of Ennui-Sur-Blasé have changed since the 19th century. The French Dispatch is very funny: I take it out of the newsstand.
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