Wes Anderson is one of those filmmakers from whom each new film is expected with a mixture of impatience and anticipatory delight. With its refined compositions, its assumed artificiality, its anthology of stars and its tangy humor, Anderson’s cinema is the equivalent of a delicious artisanal treat. After a Cannes selection in 2020 postponed to 2021, The French Dispatch (The French Dispatch at Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun) finally takes the poster.
The title refers to the “international” supplement of a fictitious American newspaper very similar to the New Yorker. Said supplement is located in the imaginary town of Ennui-sur-Blasé, in France. The film opens just as its editor (Bill Murray) has passed away.
The hour of reminiscences having struck, three journalists will swap in turn their typewriters for the narration.
The first story, reported by art critic JKL Berensen (Tilda Swinton), concerns an artist (Benicio Del Toro) who unwittingly invented modernism with the help of his muse (Léa Seydoux). One detail: he is a prisoner and she is a prison guard. If the improbable poses of the model-jailer strike the imagination, the passages from black and white to color are just as impressive.
In the background, Anderson, who works in the bosom of a large studio, explores the complicated relationship between artists and art dealers.
The filmmaker spoils himself
The second account, to a May 68 tune, is narrated by Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand). We revisit a student protest movement led by Zeffirelli (Timothée Chalamet), with whom the journalist-narrator had a brief affair, just long enough to rewrite the group’s manifesto. The notion of journalistic objectivity is taking its toll.
Explicitly, Anderson returns to the theme of parent-child conflict present in the majority of his films, including the superb Moonrise kingdom. Visually, the filmmaker spoils himself, summoning Welles, Demy and Truffaut.
Here, as in the rest of the film, Anderson’s predilection for solid images and symmetrical constructions is evident. And there are brilliant mise en abyme, as when a memory in the memory becomes a play, a play suddenly made cinematographic through travelings.
Comes the third mini-opus, told this one by Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright), about the chef (Steve Park) of the police commissioner of Ennui-sur-Blasé (Mathieu Amalric). Again, black and white lends an old-fashioned charm to the action, and again, carefully calibrated flashes of color (that close-up of Saoirse Ronan’s blue eyes!) Dazzle.
This time, Anderson lifts his hat to Clouzot by making Mathieu Amalric look like Louis Jouvet in Headquarters (from mustache to Métis son).
Moreover, this France to which the American filmmaker pays homage is not so much the real one as the one fantasized about in the cinema. Likewise, his love letter to the print media is dependent on a vision for the craft established in Golden Age classics of Hollywood like Woman of the Year and His Girl Friday (The Friday Lady).
Therefore, maybe The French Dispatch is it first and foremost a celebration of cinema. Hence the added pleasure that we take in savoring this candy.