THE FRENCH DISPATCH

THE FRENCH DISPATCH I Wes Anderson’s latest nods to old-school print journalism…

A first look at Wes Anderson’s latest fancy.

Bowing at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, 14 months after it was due to open the cancelled 2020 edition, Wes Anderson’s latest, The French Dispatch, is finally dropping through our cinematic mailboxes. A dazzling tribute to journalists of a bygone era, it’s taken on considerable lockdown-significance for the ensemble cast since they all freely gathered in Angoulême, in southwest France, to shoot in late 2018. “It’s a very familial environment [that Anderson creates],” says Adrien Brody. “Now more than ever, I see the value of that in our lives.”

Inspired by the writings of The New Yorker, the film’s titular supplement is an eccentric off-shoot of a Kansas newspaper, published in the fictional French town of Ennui-sur-Blasé sometime in the mid-20th century. The articles within, covering art, politics, cuisine and more, make up an anthology of stories that’s arguably Anderson’s most ambitious work to date, with regular collaborators joined by newcomers to his stable including Benicio Del Toro, Timothée Chalamet and Elisabeth Moss.

Brody, who first collaborated with Anderson on 2007’s

The Darjeeling Limited, plays art dealer Julian Cadazio, seen here courting Del Toro’s incarcerated artist Moses Rosenthaler. While Brody drew from his own artistic family (his mother was a photographer, his father loved painting), Del Toro spoke to Anderson about painters like Picasso and Matisse, but also Jean Renoir’s classic movie Boudu Saved From Drowning. “Wes put that on my plate to check it out,” he says.

That’s just one segment of a reference-packed film that also sees Frances McDormand’s reporter cover Paris ’68-style student protests (led by Chalamet’s virginal revolutionary) and a bizarro tale of a chef (Stephen Park) and a police commissaire (Mathieu Amalric) embroiled in a kidnap plot, narrated by Jeffrey Wright’s aspiring journo. The magazine itself is edited by – who else? – Bill Murray, while Moss, Jason Schwartzman and Owen Wilson can be seen on staff.

Like all recent Anderson movies, it’s been immaculately polished by composer Alexandre Desplat, cinematographer Robert Yeoman and production designer Adam Stockhausen. “That is a character in and of itself,” says Brody, referencing the intricacy of Yeoman’s cinematography, although as ever Anderson remains the conductor in chief. “I love how he’s created this choreography,” the actor adds, “that we all have to dance together within.”

According to Del Toro, the result of this comic odyssey is a much-needed cultural bridge between an America that too often “isolates itself” and a Europe with a rich heritage. “And thank God for it too,” he adds, “because we got filmmakers like Wes Anderson who goes out and makes this movie that is a love letter to journalists, and to Europe and France. It’s up to all of us to encourage it and to make those bridges keep happening.” JM

ETA | 22 OCTOBER / THE FRENCH DISPATCH OPENS LATER THIS YEAR.