Nobody in the film industry is doing what Wes Anderson does. And every time anyone thinks they’ve got his “thing” nailed down, he comes at them with something brand new, proving the versatility of his own cinematic language and it’s capacity for evolution. For a style that has been critiqued by some as rigid, identified and parodied countless times, Anderson never fails to find ways to diversify it, to reinvent it, whilst still maintaining its’ core values and core aesthetics. There will always be that distinct visual symmetry in a Wes Anderson film, always those eccentric characters with poetically eccentric dialogue, that exaggerated pace and sense of humour; but these things will always be in a state of perpetual expansion too.
The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun may be Anderson’s most inventive movie to date, and it is one of his most stylistically exciting. It’s an anthology film structured to resemble the select contents of its’ titular gazette, a foreign bureau of an American news outlet heavily based on the New Yorker, situated in a fictional French city called, amusingly, Ennui-sur-Blasé. It is meant to be the final issue, in lieu of the death of founder and editor Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Bill Murray), and is composed largely of reprints of earlier significant stories. It fits tidily into Andersons’ world and sensibilities, this device -his “dollhouse” visual technique ballooned and adapted to its’ largest possible parameters. Through this he has licence to experiment visually in near limitless ways, he can explore topics and conversations not customarily geared for the medium of cinema (and almost certainly derived from the pages of the New Yorker, which he reads avidly), and he can put together his largest ensemble yet.
The segments are as follows: a short about-the-town piece composed by the Cycling Reporter Herbsaint Sazerac (Owen Wilson) that gives brief insight into the world of Ennui and foreshadows some of the films’ aesthetics and themes. Then there is an arts story by J.K.L. Berensen (Tilda Swinton) chronicling the career of a criminally insane incarcerated artist (Benicio del Toro), and the success of his abstract painting Simone Naked. Following it in the poetry and philosophy section is Lucinda Krementz’s (Frances McDormand) coverage of an ideologically-fueled student protest movement led by a charismatic chess club president (Timothée Chalamet). And last as a fine dining review, Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright) accounts an adventure wherein the son of the police Commissaire (Mathieu Amalric) was kidnapped during a private dinner.
Each of these stories is presented primarily in black and white, though with salient applications of colour to illustrate flashback or memory or inspiration or artifice. These digressions often exhibit a heightened reality conveyed in a myriad of ways, each appropriate to their context: one sequence adopts the aesthetic of theatre, another employs dreamlike magical imagery, and yet another is animated to a style vaguely reminiscent of Tintin comic strips. Elsewhere, the brief flashes of colour have symbolic resonance, particularly in that first story so focused on the meaning of art, where the POV of the painting seems to be the one thing to cast the world in pigment. Two of the stories come with their own internal framing devices: an educational lecture and a talk show, which delight in their own colour languages, whether it be a bright orange auditorium or the rainbow production aesthetics that characterized variety television in the 1970s. However, it’s not to say these are reprieves from stale monochrome –in fact, Robert Yeoman’s black and white cinematography is often enthralling itself. Framing and lighting accounts for much of it –there are shots that positively resemble classical cinema, a sequence rooted in the conventions of beautiful high contrast photography. But it is also just the way of Andersons’ visual sensibility, his extremely particular care and attention to detail in his compositions that pays off in them always looking so rich, so precise. It’s an understatement to say he is an art-oriented filmmaker, and never has his work more felt like an intricate gallery.
And this is all while the film is as absurd and irreverent as anything Anderson has made –it may be one of his funniest movies. It comes up with brand new visual quirks (a POV wheelchair chase for example) and the dialogue is as delightfully offbeat as ever, delivered by many of the best actors working today. In addition to those already mentioned, the films’ cast boasts Léa Seydoux, Adrien Brody, Stephen Park, Lyna Khoudri, Liev Schreiber, Lois Smith, Saoirse Ronan, Elisabeth Moss, Tony Revolori, Alex Lawther, Rupert Friend, Christoph Waltz, Griffin Dunne, and Henry Winkler; and with cameos from Anderson regulars Edward Norton, Jason Schwartzman, Bob Balaban, Fisher Stevens, Wally Wolodarsky, and Anjelica Huston as the narrator. Anderson has already proven somewhat Altman-like in his love of ensembles and this one is certainly his most elaborate.
You wouldn’t think though that it matches the scale of the film, which seems humbler than the likes of The Grand Budapest Hotel or The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. But the individual stories and their context within this newspaper do ultimately feel quite profound. While poking fun at the modern art movement, Anderson dissects interpretive meaning in art, inspiration, the idea of a muse, and arts criticism. He seems to come to the conclusion though that the subjective power of art is independent of its processes. Anderson is likewise fascinated by philosophy and youth politics, his following narrative, wherein various degrees of young leftists argue over merits in political theory, links ideological academia to the sensation of youth empowerment. Here too, he satirizes political minutiae, manifestos, adolescent ego, through a lens of French New Wave discontent (and the story is based in the May 68 wave of student protests), but he has great affection for their initiative and passion -and even the idiosyncratic symbol of their movement: a Che Guevara-esque picture of Chalamet, who’s got the name of Zeffirelli but the look of Eisenstein, is imbued with a sincere revolutionary spirit. And for as absurd as that last tale is, Anderson examines through it the subtleties of cultural dissonance, for Wright as an American in France (a black gay American at that, heavily based on James Baldwin), and even more strongly, the immigrant chef Nescaffier (Park). The two are understated kindred spirits throughout the story, and Wright’s words of comfort to Nescaffier on the subject of their mutual feeling of displacement has a hopeful poignancy: “Maybe with good luck we’ll find what eluded us in the places we once called home.”
Each story honestly has that beautiful tenderness, though Wright conveys it best (he is the standout performer if there is one of this film). All three subjects (the last being Wright himself) are misunderstood figures who achieve a kind of enigmatic fame, all three stories involve personal expression, compromise, and sacrifice, they’re all a testament to ingenuity, and they showcase a vivid humanity that resonates for all the foibles. Together they convey an image of the French Dispatch, of journalism as Anderson sees it should be done -with a mixture of conventional reporting and colourful storytelling. Anderson has called the film a tribute to journalists, and The French Dispatch is certainly that. His writers all come together in the end to pen Howitzer’s eulogy and finish the last edition as best they can. But it is also a celebration of the lives, the stories, the lessons, and the struggles that are highlighted by the work of such journalists. It is an innately noble film, and it is one of Wes Anderson’s best!
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