The French Dispatch review
London Film Festival series 2021
Anderson’s latest work has been a long time coming, its original release for August 2020 pushed back through lockdown. Now it arrives in our cinemas, but with all of its coordinated quirks and colour, it makes for an impenetrable and alienating watch.
This new release is perhaps the most ‘Wes Anderson’ a film can get, but its flawed narrative structure, embedded intellectual in-jokes and intricate hidden quirks become irksome and tedious, depriving the film of any substance. Airless and lacking human warmth, perhaps this new dispatch suggests that Anderson has become trapped by his own distinctive house style.
The film is made up of three individual stories, each based on a feature article by one of the magazine’s star writers, plus a brief scene-setting travelogue that digs into the seedier corners of the fictional French town of Ennui-sur-Blasé. It is in this structure that the first problem arrises. By dividing a film into three smaller films or narratives, there will always be one that prevails as stronger and more coherent. And though the film’s final story is the most satisfying by far; a culinary trip turned joyous heist caper starring a brilliantly comical and charming Jeffrey Wright - much stoicism will be demanded through the preceding sections.
Indeed, the first section for me fell flat. The portrait of a criminally insane artist (Benicio del Toro) and his relationship with muse Simone (Léa Seydoux) lacked any emotional hook. Though Tilda Swinton desperately attempted to hold the story up as JKL Berensen, a fabulously wacky arts correspondent clad in a gaudy orange evening dress, it dragged on tediously. And the character of Simone felt banal, characteristic of Anderson’s concoction of the ‘perfect woman’ - a cut and paste of his previous female love interests (see Saoirse Ronan’s Agatha in The Grand Budapest Hotel or Gwyneth Paltrow’s Margot in The Royal Tennenbaums): beautiful yet cutting, ruthless but always sexy.
The next tale of student protest follows reporter Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand) and the wild-haired, bureaucracy-smashing student leader Zeffirelli (Timothée Chalamet). However the charming and humorous chemistry between McDormand and Chalamet was overwhelmed by frustration to see Anderson relegate France’s rich political history to kitsch pastels and through-away gags.
It is, however, stylistically beautiful, with sequences choreographed to perfection and colours in quirky harmony. This is a very Wes Anderson world, and this time it is eclectic as ever, using tableau vivant, split screen, animation and both colour and monographic colours to tell its stories.
However, as visually eccentric as this is, these stories need a compelling protagonist and coherent narratives pumping life into the glossy sequences, and an anthology prevents this. Where The Grand Budapest Hotel worked as an engaging and more moving piece with a singular narrative, The French Dispatch attempts to cram too many characters and stories into one piece, falling short of gaining audience sympathy for the ever-changing characters on screen. Thus the glossy pastel world of the film becomes irksome rather than, as in The Grand Budapest Hotel an endearing, funny lens through which we follow likeable on-screen characters and a captivating plot.
This is a stylistic package of kitsch and colourful wide-ranging visual content, but its narrative structure and impenetrable surface made it feel devoid of emotion and substance. This latest dispatch is a profound disappointment. It is a beautiful box with nothing inside.
In cinemas 11th February 2022. Cert. 15