This year’s Cannes has been filled with directorial self reflection: the memoir rumination of The Souvenir Part II, Mia Hansen-Løve’s meta mulling of her own craft in Bergman Island, Nadav Lapid’s similar filmmaker roman a clef in Ahed’s Knee. And then there’s Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, which isn’t about the filmmaker himself, but is intensely devoted to his personal fixations in a way that precludes outside engagement.
The film—structured as an issue of a New Yorker-esque magazine—is fussy and ornately detailed and difficult to grasp. Where Anderson’s past elaborate worlds have invited us in with all their cozy detail, The French Dispatch’s seems to haughtily sniff in our direction; it doesn’t much care if we get it.
Of course, we generally hope for a certainty of style from auteurs—the whole point of a Wes Anderson movie is that it’s a Wes Anderson movie. But The French Dispatch abuses that investment, insisting that we watch it preen and digress and advertise its creator’s smarts while giving us little to care about.
How could we care when everything is so arch and smug? Anderson, who lives in Paris, is presumably writing a mash note to his adopted country. But he’s doing it in such a shallow, generalized way that it almost plays as a troll instead. When Anderson turns to address actual things—like the labor and student protests of 1968—he can only interpret and present them as matters of aesthetic pretension.
His fascination with New Yorker writers of old—to whom he dedicates the film in a closing title card—leads him to similarly empty places. A brittle reporter (Frances McDormand) sleeps with her young subject (Timothée Chalamet) for inexplicable reasons. A James Baldwin stand-in (Jeffrey Wright) is merely a loquacious dandy with no political context, and no sense of the shape of his own story. Anderson turns his apparent heroes into bundles of quirk, making their work seem silly and mannered rather than probing. It’s an odd tribute, one premised mostly on Anderson’s youthful imagination of these imperious literary lives instead of anything so complicated and grownup as humanity.
The film is divided into sections, with three separate stories taking up most of the space. One is about a mentally ill murderer (Benicio del Toro) who happens to be a brilliant artist. Another concerns a brash young radical and his vaguely defined cause. The third is a crime caper involving a police officer’s son and the professional chef who cooks for the gendarmerie. There are a few moments of true meaning and poignancy to be found in each story, brief interludes when Anderson drops all the artisanal mugging and speaks more plainly. There is a particularly lovely soliloquy about the comforts of food when one is far from home, a sentiment about travel and solitude that does seem to be actually saying something personal about Anderson’s experience as an immigrant.
For the most part, though, the stories are busy and incomprehensible, flurries of bells and whistles that really only serve to show us how much visual wit and linguistic acrobatics Anderson is capable of. Meaning is lost in the frenzied shuffle.
Some actors, like McDormand, are able to maintain a sense of personality as they’re swallowed up by the film’s adornment. More and more in his films, he demands a certain kind of performance—flat and yet affected—that neutralizes individual style. Why cast so many interesting actors just to smoosh them into the same wooden mold? This has become more of a bad habit of Anderson’s since Royal Tenenbaums—a film that plays practically like cinema vérité compared to his later work.
As is typical of Anderson’s films, The French Dispatch often looks a marvel. But there is, this time, a disorder to the spectacle as well; it is, ironically enough, lacking an editorial eye. Anderson is dialing up the diorama-box Europe of The Grand Budapest Hotel and throwing in some animated sequences. Much of the film is in black and white, which is an interesting departure for the filmmaker. But he hops in and out of it confusingly, just as his writing takes side roads that disorientingly lead to nowhere.
All that said, The French Dispatch will no doubt have its fans. Indeed, it already does here in Cannes, where some are praising the film as a love letter to journalists. They won’t get to tell Anderson that in person, as the film has eschewed the traditional Cannes press conference. Better, I suppose, to preserve the fantasy by not grappling with the real thing.
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