Direction: Wes Anderson
Country: USA
The cinematic world of Wes Anderson remains fascinating, abundant in detail and eccentrically rich. All of these factors contribute to make The French Dispatch, a literary avant-garde anthology comedy whose skillfully constructed stories form a love letter to journalists, one of his best film in recent years.
From an insane cast to a spectacular staging and dynamic backgrounds, Anderson gives us a slice of journalistic life of other times with his peculiar comic touch. It’s a keenly affecting and visually ravishing homage to the weekly American magazine The New Yorker, in particular to its co-founder and lifelong editor-in-chief Harold Ross and the journalists that followed him.
The film is structured with four stories, the first of them linking to the other three via Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Bill Murray), an indefatigable editor-in-chief who gathered a group of expatriate journalists to bring news from the fictional French metropolis Ennui-sur-Blasé to Kansas via The French Dispatch, the magazine he founded when he was a college freshman. Each of the other three stories feature a journalist and one of his/her highlighted article.
The first of these, an unhinged account about a genius painter and dangerous psychotic inmate (Benicio Del Toro) who uses a sculptural female guard (Léa Seydoux) as his artistic muse, is narrated by writer J.K.L. Berensen (Tilda Swinton) during a talk. The painter is made famous by another inmate (Adrien Brody) with an eye for the modern art business.
Simultaneously romantic and tragic, the following story connects the respected journalist Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand) to a revolutionary student (Timothée Chalamet), while the last article is described by the reporter Rombuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright) during a TV interview. It features an animated sequence as climax and involves two policemen - a lieutenant/chef (Stephen Park) and a commissaire (Mathieu Amalric) whose son is kidnapped.
Curiously, the antique visuals lead to a contemporary greatness, and Anderson’s filmmaking accuracy leads to a charming film that works pretty well in French and English.
