If you’re looking for a movie experience that resembles reading, consider Wes Anderson’s new film, The French Dispatch, a portmanteau comedy which dramatizes a series of articles submitted to the titular magazine.
Founded in 1925 and located in the town of Ennui-sur-Blasé (yes, fictional), the Dispatch is the French foreign bureau of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun. Its editor is a no-nonsense Midwestern transplant named Arthur Howitzer, Jr. (Bill Murray), who goes by the motto, “No Crying”. The four stories that comprise the film also comprise the magazine’s final issue, released in 1975, the year Howitzer died and, in his will, ordered the magazine to close.
The first segment is “The Cycling Reporter,” a brief travelogue by Herbsaint Sazerac (Owen Wilson), who tours Ennui, mostly on bicycle, documenting the town’s idiosyncratic delights: Le Sans Blague café, a pick-pocket’s alleyway, a pesky manhole. Among Sazerac’s observations: the town has changed very little over time — the blasé view of Ennui, perhaps.
Next is “The Concrete Masterpiece”, recounted in a lecture by a toothy and orange-glowing reporter called J.K.L. Berensen (Tilda Swinton). Her article details the life and career of Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio Del Toro), a murderer-turned-painter who shook the art world with a series of abstract frescoes inspired by his nude muse — and prison guard — Simone (Léa Seydoux). Berensen’s article also portrays the seedy art dealer, Julien Cadazio (Adrien Brody), a fellow inmate of Rosenthaler’s serving a sentence for tax evasion, who befriended the artist and sought to acquire his work.
In the third story, “Revisions to a Manifesto,” Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand) documents student protests, perhaps inspired by those in Paris in 1968. Her subject, and love interest, is a young revolutionary named Zeffirelli (Timothée Chalamet) who composes a manifesto in his bath tub demanding that the boys be granted access to the girls’ dormitories; Krementz looks on maternally and offers to proofread the lad’s work.
Last, and most fanciful, is “The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner”, told by Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright) of the Tastes & Smells department. He recounts a private dinner with the Commissaire of the Ennui police force, prepared by the legendary police chef, Lieutenant Nescaffier — celebrated among “cooks, cops and captains” for a type of fine cuisine (“Gastronomie Gendarmique”) made for police officers. The dinner is disrupted when the Commissaire’s son is kidnapped and held for ransom by criminals, one of whom is a failed musician called The Chauffeur.
Altogether the film is something like a flip book — a box of wonders that consists of an unfurling series of sketches. Anderson makes frequent use of tableaux vivants and frames that combine multiple narratives. The subtitles are dense, fast and rendered in tiny font, conjuring the experience of reading. For all the ink spilt on Anderson’s filmmaking style over the years, he is also one of the most purely literary filmmakers of our time, so much so that I’d suspect his idols are writers rather than filmmakers. The closing credits pay tribute to such luminaries as James Thurber, E.B. White, Mavis Gallant, A.J. Liebling, and Lillian Ross.
Growing up in Texas, Anderson became enthralled with The New Yorker, and this film may fulfill a long-held desire to bring that magazine to life. Yet his main fascination is not the finished product, but the process through which the lived experience of ordinary people is transcribed into art or story — whether in the form of the written word, oil on canvas, film, or even food. Anderson admits his fetish for haute culture through the names and setup of each story, but he also wants to show us how intellectualism boils down to a fixation on normal people doing normal — and even mundane — things.
It’s as if to say, you don’t need to be special to have your name recited in a lecture hall or article, but you do need a writer to take an interest in you. And then, God willing, that writer needs an editor.
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The French Dispatch, 2021. Written and directed by Wes Anderson. Starring Bill Murray, et. al. Adult situations and journalistic dilemmas.