Wes Anderson is still the king of surreal invention
The French Dispatch 15 cert, 107 min
★★★★★
Dir: Wes Anderson
Starring: Adrien Brody, Léa Seydoux, Frances Mcdormand, Tilda Swinton, Wally Wolodarsky, Jeffrey Wright, Mathieu Amalric, Steve Park, Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Benicio Del Toro, Timothée Chalamet
Wes Anderson’s
The French Dispatch feels like four films in one, and contains enough ideas for at least another six. Anderson’s extraordinary 10th feature is the cinematic equivalent of a brakeless freewheel through a teeming bazaar – if said bazaar were stacked with beautiful vintage artefacts, all meticulously arranged.
Set in the 1960s in the fictional Gallic commune of Ennui-sur-blasé (and with that, the film has earned its five stars already), The French Dispatch initially feels like a companion piece to The Grand Budapest Hotel, Anderson’s wistful 2014 homage to 20th-century Europe in all its crumbling grandeur. But it quickly reveals itself to be something else entirely – or rather somethings, plural.
Billed as “an obituary, a brief travel guide and three feature articles”, the film arranges itself around the doings of The French Dispatch, an eccentric and desperately worthy New Yorkerlike magazine founded and edited by Bill Murray’s Arthur Howitzer Jr, a blustery Kansas expat (and a fond send-up of The New Yorker’s own co-founder, Harold Ross).
The opening obituary is his, and he has specified in his will that the magazine will cease publication, which means the stories that follow were all unwittingly written for its final edition. Arthur’s go-to piece of editorial advice? “Just try to make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose.” Otherwise, he’s largely content to let his staff do their own things, after which he’ll sign off on their outlandish expenses claims. Four of his star writers are our guides. First comes Owen Wilson’s Herbsaint Sazerac, who offers a whistle-stop trip around Ennui’s various districts, some with hilariously uninviting names such as “the Hovel Quarter”, and introduces some of the League of Gentlemen-like denizens to be found therein, such as a roving pack of feral choirboys. The tour comes in a flurry of Jacques Tati-like comic tableaux that rank among the most dizzyingly inventive shots Anderson has ever cooked up.
Yet these prove just a foretaste of the visual ingenuity to come, which include musical-statue organic freeze-frames, with actors wobbling ever so slightly as the camera tracks back and forth, and shots flitting from colour to black-and-white and back again, depending on which looks best and serves the moment at hand.
Next are the three main articles, the first of which is from Tilda Swinton’s art critic, J K L Berenson, who spins a tale of a mad, incarcerated artist (Benicio Del Toro) and his unscrupulous dealer (Adrien Brody, brilliantly channelling Groucho Marx). Then comes Frances Mcdormand’s Lucinda Krementz, the politics and poetry correspondent, who affects journalistic neutrality while sleeping with her quarry, a student agitator called Zeffirelli (Timothée Chalamet).
Last is Jeffrey Wright’s food critic, Roebuck Wright, whose piece on a bizarre form of haute cuisine practised by the local police force, and perfected by the legendary chef Nescaffier (Steve Park), morphs into a gripping crime narrative complete with an animated car-chase, when the force’s commissioner (Mathieu Amalric) discovers his son has been kidnapped by a gang of crooks.
The film is a hymn to human curiosity and compulsions: Anderson is clearly besotted with the style of journalism that hammers away at niche pet topics over thousands of words. But it’s also about the necessary incompleteness of a curious life. Howitzer’s scribes are all far from home, “seeking something missing, missing something left behind”, as Nescaffier bittersweetly puts it. Amid the deluxe whimsy and irony, Anderson is a master at lobbing in these little grenades of insight.
And they burst all the more powerfully when the script around them is otherwise a relentless hoot. “It was an accident, your honour,” Del Toro’s imprisoned painter croaks to a sentencing appeal board. “You decapitated two bartenders with a meat-saw,” the judge replies. Like his latest menagerie of rovers, visionaries and outsiders, Wes Anderson does nothing by halves. In cinemas now