Oddball dispatches from a true auteur
THE BIG RELEASE
THE FRENCH DISPATCH 15 ★★★★✩
TEN films in and Wes Anderson’s Wes Anderson-ness is now so off-the-scale Wes Anderson-y that you would say the Wes Anderson factor is out of control were it not for the fact that this unmistakable American auteur is all about precision-controlled style.
As his devoted cult of fans know, framing is a big thing for Wes. And this time round, The Grand Budapest Hotel director’s toy-box-within-a-toy-box conceit is that his entire movie is structured like the final edition of a New Yorker-style magazine called The French Dispatch, a fictional offshoot of the (also fictional) Liberty Kansas Evening Sun, which reports from the fictional French town of Ennui-Sur-Blasé, circa 1968.
Here, the Dispatch’s legendary editor (Bill Murray) presides over a revered collection of eccentric writers and staff, played by the likes of Frances McDormand, Owen Wilson, Elisabeth Moss, Tilda Swinton and Jeffrey Wright. And if you think that sounds starry, we haven’t mentioned the cast of their actual stories yet.
The strongest section is the most sentimental, co-starring current Bond girl Léa Seydoux as a prison guard/nude life model and Benicio del Toro as a murderer/outsider artist. Though a delightful interlude involving Dune’s Timothée Chalamet (yes, him again) as a wild-haired student revolutionary comes a close second.
Each story is a discrete one, since they are each a separate magazine feature: travel, arts, food, obituary. This formal division suits Anderson, who constructs such perfect, sophisticated aesthetic tableaux yet can often strain when it comes to correspondingly rich emotional arcs.
What links them all, aside from whimsy? Your eyeballs will be too occupied to consider. Watching this on a big screen isn’t just preferable, it’s a medical necessity. With this level of exquisite detail to process in every frame, your brain might actually explode when this gets condensed on to your phone.
Out Friday in cinemas