The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun (2021)
Directed by Wes Anderson
The staff of an American magazine based in France puts out its last issue, with stories featuring an artist sentenced to life imprisonment, student riots, and a kidnapping resolved by a chef.
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“The French Dispatch” will require multiple watches in order to pick apart the subtle references thrown in for those eagle eyed viewers (How about a nod to William Inge’s “Picnic”).
“Revisions to a Manifesto” draws on Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculin féminin —even borrowing Chantal Goya’s pop song, “Tu m’as trop menti.”
On the other hand, it reminded me of “Masculin Féminin,” one of my favorite Godard movies.
Where “The Grand Budapest Hotel” served as an homage to a single writer, Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig, “The French Dispatch” is Anderson’s arms-wide-open tribute to a generation of complicated geniuses, so the winks come as dense and dizzying as guilty-pleasure movie references do in a Quentin Tarantino picture.
If you’re not familiar with the Wes Anderson oeuvre, you might not appreciate The French Dispatch , a delightfully offbeat comedy that feels like a spiritual companion to The Grand Budapest Hotel , maybe crossed with “60 Minutes.”
From “The Royal Tenenbaums” to “Rushmore,” from “The Grand Budapest Hotel” to “Moonrise Kingdom,” the writer-director Wes Anderson is a greatly skilled miniaturist who consistently produces finely honed, exquisitely rendered works that inspire great admiration while usually leaving one a little bit … chilly.
It’s a perfect match of a foreign bureau complementing personalities, the kind Anderson served up in previous films, such as “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” “Moonrise Kingdom” and “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.”
The French Dispatch may be packed with obscure references that reward those invested in similar interests to Anderson, but while less inherently audience-friendly than The Royal Tenenbaums or The Grand Budapest Hotel , the film does use this first story to show audiences how to watch the movie.
If you don’t already dig Anderson’s vibe from works like “The Royal Tanenbaums” and “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” “French Dispatch” might be polarizing because all of the filmmaker's idiosyncrasies are on full display.
There’s the aforementioned sheer concentration of material, of course, but also the unabashed New Yorker fandom (many if not most of the French Dispatch staff have real-life New Yorker counterparts, and at least two of the tales are based on real pieces), the cinematic homages to the French New Wave (especially Godard’s La Chinoise in the second section), and the nostalgic veneration of high/fine/French culture.
Si se quiere se trata de un homenaje a la cultura francesa desde el que recorrer, entre 1950 y 1970, todos y cada uno de los arquetipos que han configurado una forma de ver el mundo a la que no son ajenas ni el cine de Jacques Tati o Carné o Truffaut ni el Tour ni La Chinoise .
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(I'm not sure why, but good for her.) Lucinda was based on a real journo, and there's an obvious homage to Zeffirelli's "Romeo and Juliet," although I'm also not sure why.
That relationship is a nod to the one in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s “Quai des Orfèvres” (1947).
All of which is a mini-film unto itself, and also a loving nod, I’d guess, to “Le Modèle,” the final chapter in the greatest of all portmanteaux, Max Ophüls’s “Le Plaisir” (1952).
It is in that space several folks, including the Cartoonist (Anderson regular Jason Schwartzman), the Story Editor (Fisher Stevens, “Short Circuit”) and the Copy Editor (Elisabeth Moss, “The Handmaid’s Tale”) have come to plan the obit and grieve for their fallen leader.
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The opening of “Concrete” bows to Jacques Rivette’s “La Belle Noiseuse” (1991).
McDormand’s composite Edna St. Vincent Millay figure is similarly facile, as are Del Toro’s tortured-artist intrigues, mixed with Léa Seydoux parodying the nudity in Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse, while Adrien Brody lampoons art-savant greed.
After an early sequence that steals directly from Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle (an exterior establishing shot of the dilapidated Dispatch building, through which a waiter passes by various windows and stairways), much of the movie fills the screen with props, sets, and busy backdrops.
Rug repair bills aside, from essentially the first moment that the dazzled viewer is introduced to the moving picture’s location – a French town glorying in the moniker Ennui-sur-Blasé, on which an average of 190,000 flakes of snow fall per year and from whose canal an average of 8.2 bodies are dredged per week – Mr. Anderson delivers such a dense and barmy barrage of minutely imagined wonders (not least a complete and perfect recreation of the famously ramshackle house from Mr. Jacques Tati‘s “Mon Oncle“) that it leaves one in something of a quandary.