108 min | R | October 22, 2021 | Searchlight Pictures
An American magazine runs its foreign bureau out of a fictional French town and publishes its final issue after the editor drops dead. Wes Anderson adapts three of its feature stories into the most elaborate diorama he has ever built. The result is gorgeous, exacting, and easier to admire than to love.
The French Dispatch is an anthology film built to look like a printed magazine. The setting is Ennui-sur-Blasé, a fictional French city, and the publication is the foreign bureau of a Kansas newspaper. The death of the editor frames the issue, and the film moves through it by reading three of its feature articles aloud. A jailed painter becomes an art-world sensation. A student uprising plays out as romance and reportage. A kidnapping resolves over a chef’s dinner. The film is about devotion to craft and the writers who give their lives to a magazine no one back home reads.
Benicio del Toro plays Moses Rosenthaler, a convicted murderer who paints abstract masterpieces in prison, and he moves with the slow menace of a man with nothing left to lose. Adrien Brody plays Julian Cadazio, the art dealer who turns the prisoner into a market, and Brody talks fast enough to sell anything. Léa Seydoux plays Simone, the prison guard who models for the paintings, and she holds still in those scenes with total control. Timothée Chalamet plays Zeffirelli, a student revolutionary who writes his manifesto in the bath, and Frances McDormand plays Lucinda Krementz, the journalist who edits the manifesto and beds the author in the same breath. Tilda Swinton plays J.K.L. Berensen as a lecturer narrating the art story from a stage, fumbling her own slides. Jeffrey Wright plays Roebuck Wright, a food writer with a photographic memory, and his account of a poisoned dinner lands as the most human passage in the film.
Wes Anderson directs from a script he wrote with Hugo Guinness, Jason Schwartzman, and Roman Coppola. He builds each story in a different register and refuses to settle on one. Robert Yeoman shoots in boxy black and white, then snaps to color for a single image, so a finished painting or a plated meal arrives as a shock. Anderson switches aspect ratios inside a scene and drops into hand-drawn animation for a car chase. The sets fold open like dollhouses, and the camera tracks across them in flat right angles. Every frame is composed to the millimeter, and the precision becomes the subject.
The control that makes the film beautiful also keeps it at a distance. Each story is a perfect object, sealed and admired, and the people inside rarely break the surface. The Roebuck Wright segment finally finds feeling because Jeffrey Wright lets loneliness leak through the recitation. The rest is a magazine you read for the layout. Anderson has made a monument to the kind of writing that no longer pays a salary. It is a love letter folded so many times that the message gets lost in the creases.