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The French Dispatch

A typical Wes Anderson whimsy, eccentric and enjoyable.

The French Dispatch

“I assure you it’s erotic,” J.K.L. Berensen (Tilda Swinton)

If Wes Anderson’s stylish fantasy The French Dispatch is not “erotic,” it’s at least his most imaginative and discursive yet Anderson-derivative film —making Grand Budapest feel like a cohesive tribute (to Austrian Writer Stefan Zweig).  He throws his stable of actors into a Francophiliac stew of five discursive stories seemingly ripped from the titular newsmagazine reminiscent of The New Yorker. 

Although not uproariously funny, it is so quirky and eccentric that you won’t even mind the first time around missing characters patterned after such editors as H.L. Mencken and William Shawn. Whoever Bill Murray’s editor, Howitzer, is supposed to be, he is ultimately the essential grumpy top newsman, no-holds-barred dictator, who shuts up an underling he’s firing with his motto, “No Crying.”

Anderson and his story collaborators Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman (relatives of Francis Ford) and Hugo Guinness frame five fantastic stories in the eccentric town of Ennui-Sur-Blasé.  They begin with episode one’s Local Color section telling of a rough, imprisoned artist Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio del Toro), whose alluring muse, Simone (Lea Seydoux), is both jailer and nude model. Typically, Anderson seems to see artists and news people as outside the pale in worlds peopled by freaks and citizens, high rollers and crooks, scolds and optimists.

The French Dispatch has an ex-pat’s sensibility with its romantic notions of Paris and the vagaries of daily life without the constant presence of gendarmes, a rose-colored reverie if you will. With the fourth episode, Tastes & Smells that tells of a Keystone Cops-like chase after kidnappers, Anderson lets us in on the less-romantic and more dangerous news profession.

Leaving us with the sober but affecting “Declines and Death” elegy for the deceased editor, The French Dispatch has been a scattered romance about news reporting and our fanciful attachment to a mystical France. Don’t try to fit the pieces together because they don’t fit; the whole is a French impressionistic take on the whimsy of life, and nobody does whimsy better than Wes.

The French Dispatch

Director: Wes Anderson (Fantastic Mr. Fox)

Screenplay: Anderson, et al.

Cast: Benicio Del Toro (Sicario), Adrien Brody (The Pianist)

Run Time: 1h 48m

Rating: R

John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts NPR’s It’s Movie Time and Cinema Classics on WCBE 90.5 FM.. Contact him at JohnDeSando62@gmail.com

John DeSando holds a BA from Georgetown University and a Ph.D. in English from The University of Arizona. He served several universities as a professor, dean, and academic vice president. He has been producing and broadcasting as a film critic on It’s Movie Time and Cinema Classics for more than two decades. DeSando received the Los Angeles Press Club's first-place honors for national entertainment journalism.