From Ennui to Liberty: The French Dispatch (2021)
Just wow. In terms of technique employed, sets, staging, camera and choreographed movement, just the detail involved, this is astounding work, a real smorgasbord. Take an 18 year old from their streaming platform viewings and turn them on to this. They would be gobsmacked at what film has the potential to be — a whole other world.
Mature Wes Anderson, Moonrise onwards, is the most marvelous blooming of the last decade that I know of. I would travel across town for a viewing.
It’s a collaborative effort of course. Everyone from his team is here. His DP Yeoman, Desplat, Bill Murray and most of his stable of actors. Tilda.
In terms of the whole architecture of a film as conceived and choreographed through, this is on the level of the truly greats, Welles, Kurosawa, Greenaway.
The anthology format, three short stories plus intro/outro, is the first thing that takes me out. As in Budapest we get a tapestry of stories within stories — but an anthology means we have to drop everything and start anew. Whatever connections exist, we lose the most fundamental one for me, a life explored in length. I have never taken to this format.
Each story is very much about the creative endeavor. The illusions and pain involved, what it unlocks and inspires. Inner versus outward. How it’s framed.
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A halfmad sculptor cheekily fuses his prized art worth millions into the immovable walls of his prison, art inspired by his captor muse. Boorish patrons find a way to pry it loose anyway and fly it to Kansas.
The middle one is a student manifesto, juvenile, polished by sexual discovery (McDormand) that gives way to real youthful spark. He dies for juvenile, youthful revolution. Becomes a commercial icon used to sell t-shirts anyway.
The third one involves cooking that eventually reunites father and son; logical (police) procedure that at the crucial moment is solved by artful invention, the cook’s toxic radishes. A son the father was preparing for logical investigation (of stories), but the boy maybe just maybe some times needs a blue-eyed blonde’s lullaby.
This is studied work make no mistake. Fans of Greenaway, Raoul Ruiz, Resnais, from the school of nested fiction, will find a lot to rejoice.
There are lovely images I’ll still carry next month; swarm of cats on rooftops, Lea’s etherial flow in front of concrete frescoes (of herself), rooms of people arrested mid-air.
Ultimately I do miss what set later Anderson apart — transcendent gust, not just gusto. Moonrise and Budapest pulsed with wonder, magic, discovery, next to intricate setups.
There was a marvelous scene in Moonrise. While a play was being staged — a story within the story of the film — the young boyscout run off to explore ‘behind the stage’, where people are not the assigned role.
I wish we had that here. This is more like the people quirkily arranged on the stage, framing ideas. We’re still lucky and richer that he could make it.
