This time trading in the pastel for monochrome, Wes Anderson is back with an ode to ex-pat writers and a celebration of l’art pour l’art in The French Dispatch.
★★★★✰
What started as a holiday ends in heartache. More specifically, a heart attack suffered by Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Bill Murray), founder and editor of The French Dispatch—a factual weekly arts and culture magazine bundled with The Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun. And so begins Wes Anderson’s latest spectacle, The French Dispatch—a portmanteau film with a love for cinema and the wider arts at its core.
Howitzer Jr.’s death at the film’s beginning marks the end of the magazine, home to some of the greatest writers ever put to print. But not until one final edition is published, to celebrate the late editor and the artistry that The French Dispatch has been home to. Being a Wes Anderson film this is, of course, all an absurd fiction brought to life by an ever-expanding troupe of Hollywood A-Listers, and vividly painted through the director’s singularly twee aesthetics. It’s also a great deal of fun, owing in part to one of Howitzer Jr.’s catchphrases: “No Crying”. The writers of The French Dispatch honour the late editor with an unsentimental obituary which only in rare moments takes on a tone fitting their location: Ennui-sur-Blaisé (rough translation: Boredom-on-Jaded).
The film depicts the final edition of the magazine which consists of an obituary, a travel log by cycling enthusiast Herbsaint Sazerac (Owen Wilson), and three short stories. Anderson is one to load his films with cinematic references and here each story loosely draws upon different parts of France’s cinematic history; there’s “The Concrete Masterpiece” which concerns an artist imprisoned by his muse and evokes the French cinema of the 1930s, “Revisions To A Manifesto” which parodies the events of May ‘68 in the style of La Nouvelle Vague, and “The Private Dining Room Of The Police Commissioner” which, narrated by a sombre Jeffrey Wright, unfolds like a classic French police thriller.
Given Anderson’s track record it almost goes without saying that the entire film is put together like an intricate piece of clockwork. Expect fantastic performances from a cast of heavyweights—even Willem Dafoe who, barely uttering a word, still manages to provoke a warm reception. The starstudded-ness of the cast only adds to Anderson’s now-infamous dolls house aesthetic, and the theatricality has this time been dialled all the way to eleven (or at least one more than whatever the wildly theatrical The Grand Budapest Hotel was tuned to).
Read More: ‘Bottle Rocket’ at 25: Re-Appraising Wes Anderson’s Zany Debut
There may be historical parallels to be made, not least with the evocation of May ‘68, but make no mistake, this is Anderson at his most playful. Very much in the mould of The Grand Budapest Hotel, The French Dispatch is structured like a Russian doll—frame narratives giving way to more frames. If there appears to be any theme tying the whole thing together it would be a celebration of storytelling. The film plays with the border (or lack thereof) between the stories and their storyteller, with each narrator falling deeper into a world they believe to only be observing. From an audience perspective also, the temptation to burrow into these delightful little fables is overwhelming.
The Verdict
The French Dispatch is an unsentimental obituary that turns out to be tonnes of fun. Some may deride this as style over substance, but few can pull off style as substantial as Wes Anderson.
Words by Jake Abatan
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