The French Dispatch reviewed by Mark Kermode

french dispatch latest from where's anderson at his most was anderson so set in the fictional town of enwy son blase a name which i think tells you all you need to know chronicles the creation of the last edition of the french dispatcher publication very much in the mould of the new yorker um presented in that in that very wes anderson anyway as an obituary travel guide and three brief features from the paper the obituary is for publisher arthur howitzer bill murray who brought the world to kansas and whose maxim is to his writers try and make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose which is actually a very a very good maxim for writers and he has a sign in his office says no crying francis mcdormand is the cinder cremants who becomes involved with timid a chalamet his second film his second film of the week um as a young radical who is writing she's writing about the student uprising that he's involved in and her assignment basically includes reading proofing and improving his uh manifesto and the film basically kind of flips backwards and forwards but it's got a number of different stories so there's that story there's a story of roebuck who is someone who is always writing about food because it has an emotional place in his heart but he can recall everything that he reads and he can recall entire articles that he wrote and recite them out loud as indeed he did tilda swinton is jkl berenson who promotes a french splash action pioneer played by uh benicio del toro who is a convicted killer whose muse is his guard played by leah sidhu currently starring in no time to die he becomes the figurehead of a group of artists who would quite quote inspire and occasionally insult assault each other and the film moves from black and white to color from four by three to wide from movement to tableau vivo from live action to animation it feels like it's bursting into tableau people standing in a live tableau okay so being literally what it sounds like um and it does all of these often within the same story sometimes within the same scene and occasionally within the same sentence it's incredibly wordy i mean the the script must have read like a novel packed with the kind of tiny detail for which anderson is you know sort of celebrated and famous and every single gag feels like it has been machine tooled to within an inch of its life to be that specific gag now the two things i'd say is this the first thing is i was very aware on the first viewing that it's probably a film that you'd need to see two or three times in order to get everything that was going on even then you probably wouldn't have everything and i sometimes felt like okay i definitely need to watch this again because i'm not quite getting involved in it second thing is it is as is true with other anderson movies probably best described as a live action animation because that's what it feels like that has been true of other of his films and of course he has directed animation it has a kind of it's almost like a music box you know like everything everything happens with a kind of mechanical metronomic precision the way the stories kind of intertwine and interlock you will either find it abundantly charming and funny and super smart and full of references many of which i didn't get or the thing i came out thinking was it's a bit like a box of fondant fancies that from the outside looks absolutely delicious but when you've eaten three of them you think okay that's enough for the moment i should qualify that by saying i am pretty certain that a second viewing of the film will enhance my my enjoyment of it because it does feel so wes andersony it does feel like i mean i've had an interview with me even just this morning i think on uh which i can't remember where it was but he took talking about you know this is the film that he made exactly the way that he would want to make it although as if you've ever seen a wes anderson filming which that wasn't the case it doesn't however have for me that emotional pull of grand budapest hotel or i mean i know you and i both have a fondness for life aquatic it's not it's not in quite the same ballpark as that but it does feel like there is an awful lot going on that is absolutely the most wes anderson film wes anderson could ever make and on that basis i think that wes anderson fans will take to it i i don't love it i found i found it a bit much but that may just be you know it's my quirky irksome thing it over quirked itself from my point of view even even whilst i was looking at it thinking this is astonishing it is like a live action animation and the way in which the frame is changing and the color scheme is changing and now they're in animation now the thing is is well done there are individual gags that land overall i found it slightly impenetrable

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Length: 5min 4sec (304 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 22 2021