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When you watch a Wes Anderson movie, you know that. Within seconds, you spot the symmetrical compositions, horizontal camera movements, garish blocks of color, san-serif lettering, arched, verbose, vaguely melancholy humor and all the other elements that set his comedies apart from all the others. others. You probably also know if you love his job or hate him. Well, The French Dispatch is not going to change your mind. Her long-awaited coat rack, which premiered at Cannes on Monday, is the most Anderson of all Anderson films. It’s Anderson distilled, Anderson squared, Anderson nth degree. Some viewers will watch it 100 times and discover new little details every time. Other viewers will come out or shut down in a matter of minutes.
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The film is an anthology of three whimsical short stories set in France in the mid-twentieth century. The vanity is that they were all published in an English-language magazine which is published in the fictional French town of Ennui-sur-Blasé, but which is attached to an American newspaper based in Kansas. We first meet the devoted and eccentric editor, played by Bill Murray (who else?), And the staff played by Elisabeth Moss and Jason Schwartzman (one of the three writers who aided Anderson in the plot. ). Then, a guided tour of the city is offered by a cyclist Owen Wilson wearing a beret. And then the three main stories begin.
The first is the raucous story of a violent psychopath with a bushy beard (Benicio del Toro) who happens to be a great artist. While behind bars, he paints abstract portraits of the smileless babysitter (Léa Seydoux) he loves. A talkative art dealer (Adrien Brody) believes he has found the future of art, but a career in a high security prison is not easy. The second story – the least satisfactory of the three – is the account of a radical student (Timothée Chalomet) and the journalist (Frances McDormand) who ghostly writes his revolutionary manifesto. And the third is an exuberant criminal hug in which the son of a police chief (Mathieu Amalric) is kidnapped by a gangster (Edward Norton).
It is not these outlines that matter, however, as much as the thoroughness with which they are filled. The French Dispatch has to be one of the most painstaking films there is. It gives the impression that the Grand Budapest Hotel was improvised over a weekend and shot with a smartphone. Not a scene happens that hasn’t been embellished with a split screen, a freeze frame, a subtitle, a voiceover, a switch between monochrome and color, or ‘a change in radio aspect. One section will suddenly become a play, comic book-style cartoon, cat-show anecdote, or a lecture given in glorious style by Tilda Swinton in a shocking orange dress and matching wig.
The production design of Adam Stockhausen’s dollhouse is breathtakingly precise, the black and white images of the town’s old buildings (shot in Angoulême) deserve their own coffee table book, the music of Alexandre Desplat continues to beat and sparkle, and the flowery prose is so elaborate that the characters are not hungry, they are “in a disastrous state of caloric exhaustion”. Even the cast is beefed up, so the smaller wink-and-you-miss-it role is played by Willem Dafoe, Saoirse Ronan, and Henry Winkler. The French Dispatch is quite exhausting to watch so I can’t imagine how demanding it must have been.
There were times I doubted it was worth it – that it was crazy for Anderson to work so obsessively on three breezy, cheeky vignettes that aren’t hilarious or heartbreaking or insightful. The film is both a tip of the New Yorker’s hat, among other American magazines, and a love letter to expatriate life in France. But beyond? Not much is happening under its extraordinary jeweled surface. The film is – to use a French term – a mind games without depth to its characters or edge to its satire.
But there’s something deliciously perverse about Anderson’s hyper-industrial treatment of such fragile material. Its craftsmanship is so overwhelming that unless you’re already allergic to its tics and trademarks, you should be enjoying the film’s many, many incidental pleasures. One thing’s for sure: there’s nothing quite like The French Dispatch – other than Anderson’s other films, of course.
★★★★ ☆
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