The French Dispatch: Wes Anderson’s nostalgic celebration of the printed world
Wes Anderson is a love-him-or-hate-him type of author. The symmetrical shots, the horizontal camera movements, the highly saturated colors, the Futura fonts, the whimsical humor - these elements all cue the viewer that they've stepped into one of Wes Anderson's worlds. Bringing together an all-star cast, a signature picturesque backdrop, and a distinct storyline, Anderson finally debuts his long-awaited “The French Dispatch” to the public.
The film is billed as a lavishly Andersonian love letter to journalism. As Anderson said in an interview with Time Out, The French Dispatch and the characters in the film were inspired by the director’s experience living in France as an American. The inspiration for the film, coupled with his long-standing love for The New Yorker and his obsession with the French New Wave, Wes Anderson creates a huge amount of nostalgia in this meticulously crafted narrative.
The film is an anthology of three short stories: an artist in prison, student riots, and a kidnapping. Each story is narrated through the pens of journalists at an English magazine edited in a fictional French city, Ennui-sur-Blasé. A lot of acclaimed journalism films (like All the President’s Men and Spotlight) are about brilliant reporters, their work, and the importance of their profession for people who deserve the truth. The French Dispatch portrays journalists in a different light, where the reporters play the same role as private eyes do in mystery stories: the spotlight in this anthology of a film is shed on journalists rather than the subjects of writing.
The film is split into disparate sections and the watching experience is like reading a magazine under final editing in a newsroom seminar, seeing detailed stories about art, politics, and food, and flipping back and forth between the narrators’ perspectives as well as the stories themselves. Much of the film, especially when the reporters retell their stories, are filmed in black and white, which is a clear nod to the French New Wave movies of Truffaut and Godard. However, Anderson’s hyper-nostalgic literary narrative structure doesn’t land with all viewers or film critics. Many of his detractors comment that the meandering short-story format and the lack of emotional pull in the central character dynamic make its emotional temperature oddly low. As many describe The French Dispatch as “the most Wes Anderson movie to date;” structured in a series of episodic vignettes, the film turns out to be an absurdly stereotyped description of Anderson’s movie structure. Different from the recurring style of The Royal Tenenbaums and The Grand Budapest Hotel, which are presented in a nested narrative structure, The French Dispatch tells a series of seemingly unrelated yet surprisingly interconnected stories. The film visually engages stereotypical archetypes of a magazine like The New Yorker by featuring cartoons, amusing covers, page numbers, and unsurprisingly, ads. It clearly represents itself as an cultural artifact independent of the real world, an elegiac tribute to a bygone world.
The movie is absolutely a feast for the eyes, whether or not you like Anderson’s overlapping forms of film, animation, printed text, and magazines. All the quirky hallmarks of Anderson’s films can be found in The French Dispatch; each frame is meticulously detailed, and viewers are demanded to interact with the words and images that appear on screen. The idiosyncratic director’s dry comedic sensitivity cues us to read the deadpan humor in the characters’ faces of chaos. As a beautiful tribute to well-structured artistry and dazzling stagecraft, The French Dispatch reaches a new dimension of social observation based on Anderson’s recognizable visual aesthetics and decorative ingenuity.
Each story revolves around authorities and institutions: prison and gallery, police station, college and square where student protests happen. Each long shot is composed of countless and meticulously designed details to create a sense of social construction and to show how the power of institutions are reinforced and redefined in their practice. For example, at the beginning of the third story, the black protagonist wanders in the police station run by the white, which is a Foucault-style cinematic construction of the power relationship and discipline system expressed in Anderson’s language. As an “intruder” of the police station, a typical disciplined institution and a network of regulation in Foucault’s discipline-punishment theory, the black man breaks through the sophisticated disciplinary power and builds up obscure correlation with other characters in the film. The crowded, visually insistent depiction (including the voice-overs and visual languages) in The French Dispatch also allows for a critical perspective to grow within the audience. The frames stuffed with sumptuous details highlight the illusory constructiveness of the empowered institutions including police station, school, and prison. The meticulously crafted frames crammed with details are more than visually remarkable: they are also powerful social indicators of the power relationships underlying the institutions.
Anderson’s cinematic universe is too vibrant and deliberately constructed to be possibly real. Yet, the bright color and pastel templates, French New Wave, and ‘70s rock music, all contribute to his sincere, nostalgic celebration of the printed media of days past. This is where dissociation in the real world and Anderson’s affectionate fantasy meet - we are welcome into this nostalgic, quirky elegy to the print journalism era in a golden glow.
