The French Dispatch

  • 31 Jul - 06 Aug, 2021
  • Mag The Weekly
  • Reviews

The French Dispatch is a riff on and tribute to the New Yorker magazine, with its legendary roster of writers, famed insistence on standards, collegiate office culture, distinctive cartoons and typographic layout, metropolitan sophistication targeted at a general American readership.\

The French Dispatch itself is supposed to be a special feuilleton-type supplement in a fictional Kansas newspaper, a guide to the intellectual life of France produced in the magazine’s late 60s heyday by a gallery of brilliant American expatriates in the imagined provincial French town of Ennui-Sur-Blasé – although that name is the one moment where the comedy gets a little too broad.

The movie is a kind of short story anthology, taking place in a postmodern Clochemerle, based on the long-read reportage performances of its superstar writers, who almost all have some personal, and indeed physical, involvement with what is going on, quite against dull ideas about journalistic neutrality.

The proprietor and editor is the diffident, avuncular yet authoritative Arthur Howitzer Jr, played by Bill Murray, a figure clearly based on Harold Ross – but also, perhaps, the late Robert B Silvers of the New York Review of Books.

Tilda Swinton is art critic JKL Berensen, who tells the story of the convicted murderer Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio Del Toro) for whom prison guard Simone (Léa Seydoux) acts as nude model and muse. Frances McDormand is Lucinda Krementz, a writer who does a deep-dive into Ennui-Sur-Blasé’s roiling student revolutionary scene, and winds up having an affair with its young leader Zeffirelli (Timothée Chalamet).

And Jeffrey Wright gives a wonderfully poised performance as food writer Roebuck Wright who recounts in a television interview his attempt to interview the special police chief Lieutenant Nescafier (Stephen Park), whose job is to provide special food for les flics, and Roebuck’s subsequent eyewitness account of the kidnapping of the son of the commissaire (Mathieu Amalric). And, of course, the repertory cast includes many other big names in cameo.

Mr Howitzer can be a stern taskmaster – he fires a copy boy simply for presuming to tell him the print deadline is approaching – but he has only two maxims: no crying and try to make it seem you wrote it that way on purpose. But in fact there is a strange wash of melancholy by the closing credits, as the magazine closes and we are semi-seriously invited to feel sad at the end of a non-existent publication.

All in all, The French Dispatch has amazing visuals, lots of laughs and an A-list cast, making Anderson’s tribute to the New Yorker a real treat.

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