Fox,” in part because of the microcosmic details that each frame of the film exuded, and “The French Dispatch” is by far the richer movie. I felt the same way about “ Fantastic Mr. In my mind, it’s necessary to see “The French Dispatch” twice in order to see it fully even once, which I mean as a high artistic compliment. The effort even to make sense of what’s going on-to parse the action into its constituent elements, to assemble its narratives, its moods, and its ideas-leads to inevitable oversimplifications, the reduction of roiling cinematic energy into mere mental snapshots. On first viewing, audience members run the risk of having their perceptual circuits shorted.
#WES ANDERSON FRENCH DISPATCH INTERVIEW MOVIE#
Even its static elements are set awhirl-actions and dialogue performed straight into the camera, scenes of people sitting at tables joined with rapid and rhythmically off-kilter editing, tableaux vivants that freeze scenes of turmoil into contemplative wonders-and take flight by way of a briskly moving camera.įor all its meticulous preparation, the movie swings, spontaneous, unhinged, and it’s precisely this sensory and intellectual overload that gives rise to the misperception that it is static, fussy, tight.
Far from being an inert candy box or display case, the movie bursts and leaps with a sense of immediacy and impulsivity the script (which Anderson co-wrote with Roman Coppola, Hugo Guinness, and Jason Schwartzman) bubbles over with the sense of joy found in discovery and invention. This is true of its décor and costumes, its variety of narrative forms and techniques (live action, animation, split screens, flashbacks, and leaps ahead, among many others), its playful breaking of the dramatic frame with reflexive gestures and conspicuous stagecraft, its aphoristic and whiz-bang dialogue, and the range of its performances, which veer in a heartbeat from the outlandishly facetious to the painfully candid. “The French Dispatch” contains an overwhelming and sumptuous profusion of details. The features, each running about a half hour, catch the grand preoccupations and varied subjects of the magazine’s writers, and the combination of style and substance that marks their literary work-and Anderson’s cinema. The movie takes the form of the magazine’s final issue, which features Howitzer’s obituary a brief travelogue by a writer named Herbsaint Sazerac (Owen Wilson), which shows, in a thumbnail sketch, how the publication’s tone and substance has evolved and three long feature articles. Unlike The New Yorker, The French Dispatch is based in France, in the made-up town of Ennui-sur-Blasé, where young Howitzer decided to prolong a vacation more or less forever by transforming the Sunday supplement of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun-a newspaper owned by his father-into a travelogue that soon morphed into a literary sensation. (Bill Murray), and 1975, the year of Howitzer’s death and (by his testamentary decree) the magazine’s as well. Anderson sends writers out in search of stories, and what they find turns out to be a world of trouble, a world in which aesthetics and power are inseparable, with all the moral complications and ambivalences that this intersection entails.Īnderson’s fictional publication operates between 1925, the year of its founding by Arthur Howitzer, Jr. In “The French Dispatch,” it is all the more central, given his literary focus: the title is also the name of a fictitious magazine that’s explicitly modelled on The New Yorker and some of its classic journalistic stars. His movies often rest upon an apparent paradox between the refinement of his methods and the violence of his subject matter. And, for all its whimsical humor, it is an action film, a great one, although Anderson’s way of displaying action is unlike that of any other filmmaker. “The French Dispatch” is perhaps Anderson’s best film to date. “The French Dispatch” should finally dispel a common misgiving about the movies of Wes Anderson-namely, that there is something enervated, static, or precious about the extremes of the decorative artifice of which his comedy is made.
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