Film
The French Dispatch
- Director
- Wes Anderson
- Certificate
- TBA
- Running Time
- 103 mins
Wes Anderson gets the old gang back together for yet another masterpiece. This one’s billed as a love letter to journalism, notably publications like The New Yorker, and is set in the fictional quaint French town of Blasé-sur-Ennui (geddit?), where the very last edition of the eponymous highbrow literary magazine is going to press, following the death of its founder (Bill Murray).
The staff and its celebrity writers gather to reflect on the Dispatch‘s halcyon days. There’s the art critic (Tilda Swinton) who regales with the story of a jailed painter’s (Benicio Del Toro) obsession with his muse (Léa Seydoux); a political correspondent (Frances McDormand) whose ‘current affairs’ once included a young insurgent (Timothée Chalamet) during a student protest; and the rarefied food critic (Jeffrey Wright) who becomes quite the pot-au-feu when he finds himself caught up in a kidnapping plot. A handful of critics have sniped that as this is essentially an anthology film it lacks coherence and the emotional punch of Anderson’s earlier features. But as Variety pointed out: ” . . ..there is no living filmmaker with a more recognizable visual signature, and every frame of The French Dispatch is unmistakably his. Thus, the unconventional project succeeds in delivering that very particular hodgepodge pleasure of reading a well-curated issue from cover to cover.”
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