This cinema, "The French Dispatch," is about a magazine. That is the best one-liner I could come up with when trying to start writing the review. It is not to say that the movie is so complicated it can't be put down in words, though I saw the notion repeatedly circulating online. It is to say, however, that the immensity of emotions in this film is hard to measure with words.
The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun, is a magazine based in Ennui-sur-Blasé, a French metropolis that isn’t Paris but will remind one of 1930s Paris. The magazine started in Liberty, Kansas, and was originally called Picnic. Editor Arthur Howitzer, Jr who dons a “No Crying” sign over his door, presides over the whole operation. He protects, tolerates and encourages his writers without hesitation and with unuttered fondness.
This is an anthology film laid out like a magazine, with a short front-of-the-book piece and three long features, along with an absolutely beautiful epilogue. The film is a Rubik’s Cube, made up with seemingly very different stories, but in the end, they fit perfectly in uniform.
The three-story anthology features an insane artist, a student protest, and a heist thriller. The short piece is a prose-poem tour of Ennui, conducted by Owen Wilson on a bicycle. Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand, and Jeffrey Wright are our three designated journalists for the features.
Sazerac (Owen Wilson) gives an introductory sketch of Ennui, "The Talk of the Town," causing some unfortunate collisions because he constantly looks directly into the camera while taking us through the various mischief of the city. My favourite one being "the pickpocket corner," it made the city very endearing to me, perhaps because the city I grew up in also had a distinct pickpocket corner. And I never thought twice of it, until this little line accompanying a fleeting shot came up, and I thought how the most weirdly wonderful details skip our mind!
Then came JKL Berensen (Swinton) with a tormented painter (Benicio Del Toro) in a feature titled “The Concrete Masterpiece.'' The painter moved through time unattached and now is incarcerated for double homicide. He is discovered by a fellow inmate, an art collector serving time for tax evasion played by Adrien Brody. The artist’s muse is a prison guard, Simone (Léa Seydoux). He is the literally tortured artist who is trying to paint the woman he fell in love with (Simone) over and over again.
Next Lucinda Krementz (Francis McDormand) comes with the feature “Revisions to a Manifesto,” with a rebellious student, Zeffirelli, played by Timothée Chalamet. Near the end of it, Lucinda describes the various protests of the students, commenting on the "touching narcissism of the young." Where everything is at a high stake, and immediate, urgent. Where love has to be seized now, and revolutions have to be brought today!
Lastly, Roebuck Wright is paired with a precinct-house chef (Stephen Park); the legendary chef named Nescaffier. Roebuck Wright, as played by Jeffrey Wright, resembles James Baldwin. The whole feature resembles “Equal in Paris” written by James Baldwin, published in Notes from a Native Son. Roebuck who sets out to write about food, ends up writing about loneliness, shivering cold, and the meaning of life. Roebuck who doesn't have a photographic memory, he has a "typographic memory."
It's long been said this cinema is a "love letter to journalism." That it depicts The New Yorker in its mid-20th-century glory years. It is about a time when indulgence wasn't vile, and there were writers swarming in and out of office buildings placing their pieces that captured curious snippets of life. When they could write with the obvious assurance that they are protected and will be cared for till the end of time.
All Wes Anderson films have been inspired by the books and authors the director loves. There are shadows of JD Salinger in “The Royal Tenenbaums”; Roald Dahl in “Fantastic Mr Fox”; Stefan Zweig in “The Grand Budapest Hotel." This is the director’s tenth feature, and in a 2019 interview with Charente Libre, Wes Anderson said that his new movie, "The French Dispatch" was "not easy to explain."
With Alexandre Desplat's score playing in the background, there are animation, graphics, still lifes, visual puns, and gags. So, it runs the risk of getting incomprehensible. But even after mentioning all the books, and the other numerous references in the film that I'm sure I’ve missed, one doesn't have to know and read up on things to connect with the film. What I am trying to say is this, "The French Dispatch" will bridge a line across to those who wander and don't strictly confide in realities the popular culture provides.
In miniature smaller gestures, the visual tempos of the film while illustrating chaos, where often the people in it directly look into the camera, knock down the walls of ideal imagination. From frequently switching from black-and-white to colour to various frames freeze where moments linger on, this is the peak of Wes Anderson's style. Where beauty is meaningful and meaningless, and even the damndest tragedy is laughable and therefore more endurable.
There's a puncturing sense of loyalty in the film. It is about these characters inhabiting their respective stories where they let go of the obvious things and hold on to the requisite essentials, essentials that make life a worthwhile aim. This sense of loyalty also erupts from the fact that the director seems to have found his people, working with more or less the same set of groups.
Other than the script, which Anderson co-wrote with Roman Coppola, Hugo Guinness, and Jason Schwartzman, the audience already has seen most of the actors in "The French Dispatch" in Wes Andarsonian light before. Even the voice-over from Anjelica Huston throughout the movie brings out a pleasing comfort of knowingness. Where love isn't spelt out, and where tenderness might take the disguise of indifference.
This is a film about misfits, where the custodians are unbelievably kind. This is a cinema of stories about how stories are made. This cinema shows how the world is trying to fix something which isn't broken. This is a dream of a world that is gone, and perhaps never fully existed in the first place. This is about the people who wonder what if the feeling of being alienated doesn't pass, what if the sense of isolation is not a fleeting phase.
"The French Dispatch" for me is a burst of poetic multiplicities. Now, when it feels like the world is crumbling down, where anxiety and a sense of loss are omnipresent, after watching the film I invariably heard Nico's "These Days" playing on in my head. Since The Royal Tenenbaums, I can't help but think of Wes Anderson without that tune. So, These Days plays on, and I think of all the ways we, as a devilishly imaginative species, carry on loving standing on the wasteland.
And keeping up with "The French Dispatch," where it became a book, I want to end with the title of a poem by DH Lawrence. Because after watching the film that's what came to me through the kaleidoscopic images of the film. And it says, "Look! We Have Come Through!"
Yes, the cinema gave me that kind of hope, hope which isn't naive.