The French Dispatch (2021)
Review of The French Dispatch (2021), directed by Wes Anderson
On a cold, rainy Saturday, I ventured out to my local AMC Theatre in order to see a movie I had waited so long for: The French Dispatch. At the beginning of my college life this movie was announced to be in the works, and at the time I had been interested in seeing it due to the sheer amount of star power attached to the movie. And Timothée Chalamet. I was obsessed with Chalamet back in the beginning of college, though, to be frank, I’m not as big as a fan of his acting. He tends to fit the generational aesthetic in my opinion, which is how he’s just exploded in popularity.
Anyways, I planned to see this movie when it originally dropped in New York City, but then the lovely COVID-19 pandemic hit. And a year later, I’ve now seen it back home in Baltimore a week fresh off of seeing the glorious Dune. If you forced me to pick one of the two movies right now, I would pick Dune over The French Dispatch. But it has its merits, which I will discuss later in this review. On with the actual content in this.
In The French Dispatch, Wes Anderson delves into the world of storytelling for journalists.
As I wrote above, The French Dispatch is the ultimate homage to old-school print journalism, something that is now dying. Each of the writer characters is also generally based on someone who was a writer (lot of classic New Yorker writers listed in the credits as being an inspiration); I noticed a lot of Lillian Ross in the first and second stories especially. But don’t fall in love with these characters because you don’t get to spend a lot of time with them—we jump from story to story, and the only ones who return in each story are the journalists/writers themselves.
First we must dismantle the storytellers of this grand over-arching narrative: the staff members, who are all American expats in France, working at The French Dispatch. The editor-in-chief has just died, revealed in the opening scenes of the movie, and has decided to shut the magazine down with his death. They all gather in an office to discuss what should be published in this issue, which leads down the rabbit hole of what the three bigger stories are. Right before his death, our EIC makes his rounds to see what the stories are.
The first mini-story is intended for us to set the stage of the town we’re in. Owen Wilson’s character, Herbsaint Sazerac, is a travel writer. He takes his little bicycle and rides around the city we’re stuck in for the rest of the movie: a fictional town called Ennui. His description of Ennui isn’t the most flattering, as he describes the metro rats and how the local church boys are going to mug you. Herbsaint does ultimately get mugged by the church boys.
Our first main story is about an artist. The key fact here is that he’s in prison because he full on beheaded two bartenders for no reason. Narrated by Tilda Swinton’s character, we see the narration of how the artist had a priveleged upbringing but was slightly unhinged, leading him to where he is. As an art dealer buys his painting in prison, he explodes in popularity globally, and the dealer lowkey wants to exploit him. But our artist is a simple man, as he only loves his prison guard that doesn’t love him back.
The second story stars Timothée Chalamet and Frances McDormand, a combination I later find weird because of how his college-aged character sleeps with a very much older McDormand (who is the journalist here). Chalamet’s character, Zeffirelli, is the leader of revolutionary student groups at his campus and is pitted against a smart-mouthed girl who is at least one hundred times more anarchist than he will ever be. McDormand helps Zeffirelli out with his manifesto against the system, there’s a lot of weird chess, and he seems to see her for who she is: a lonely old woman writer.
Our third and final story before the obituary section stars Jeffrey Wright. He is a food journalist who’s written a story not really about food. He’s been asked to profile a certain police chef, played by Stephen Park, goes to dinner at a policeman’s house, and then Wright finds himself tangled into this entire situation where a son has been kidnapped and the chef solves it all through food. This, to be honest, was my least favorite story of them all because of the execution (although Anderson implemented comic book storytelling in this section, which was pretty cool). Wright’s character clearly is modeled after James Baldwin, but I found the story doesn’t do him justice.
The good about this movie: Anderson said that this movie was intended to have each and every shot be an individual ecosystem, and wow he did that brillianty. He’s a master of using color and blocking in his scenes, and, once again, he has proven himself in The French Dispatch. It’s also really hard to build and flesh out characters when you spend so little time with them, so I’m genuinely impressed at how he managed to make each character distinct and stick with us.
Besides that, another thing to point out is how he switches from black and white to color. It happens on and off again, but it adds such a depth to the story. When you’re deprived of these senses and suddenly switch them back and forth, they become really striking and demonstrate to you the power of color. This really struck me in the last story when the showgirl, played by Saoirse Ronan, suddenly was switched into color, showing us how brilliantly blue her eyes were.
Now the negatives: I think this was way too much crammed into one movie. Yes, the characters were fleshed out, but I wanted to spend more time in the universes created within each of the stories. Zeffirelli was one I was particularly interested in spending more time with, because he became a cultural icon of youth resistance. I also really wanted to know more about the three journalists in the main three stories as well because of how interesting their backstories are. We have Wright being like Baldwin, the lonely woman that is McDormand’s character, then Swinton’s character just seems like an eccentric rich art lady who has become a writer.
The movie also seems to make fun of itself at times, which was hit or miss. I didn’t need to hear about Zeffirelli calling his own dick a tool being sucked. My theatre was either dead silent or had some chuckles scattered at odd parts. The camera angles also are something you don’t see every day in mainstream cinema: we clearly had a camera mounted onto a dolly for some scenes that was then moved horizontally as people stayed extremely still. This made the movie such a visually appealing experience, but a bit lackluster in regards to plot.
The one thing that’s one of my biggest complaints here is that this movie screams male gaze. We have so much female nudity, and then the women journalists all mention having to sleep with their subjects but the male ones can be all macho without it. The movie itself is extremely creative but at the same time I shouldn’t have to hear about women writers subjecting themselves to a lonely life lacking a male figure. I get that it’s set in the 1960s, but come on. It full on fails that one test about women in film.
Also a warning: if you see this in a theatre on a regular digital screen, the subtitles will 100% be cut off. They were in mine. A large portion of the dialogue ends up being in French but is translated not at the bottom of the screen, but more underneath the character speaking, and so in my theatre, which didn’t have a massive screen, the subtitles got cut off and you’d miss completely what they were saying if you don’t understand French. I don’t so I had a fun time trying to fill in the missing blanks.
Overall Thoughts
As a writer myself, I found myself nodding along to several of the struggles that were depicted in this film. I think this film is for Wes Anderson fans and those who are really into old-school journalism. You’d get such a major kick out of seeing Wright in the middle of a gun fight just scribbling down notes for the piece underneath a table. I enjoyed the film as a visual experience, but I couldn’t get into the structure and the way that it was executed. I wanted to spend more time in this world to really get to know the characters. But, alas, Anderson would never split these into individual films so here we are. I wouldn’t pay to watch this in a theatre (I have AMC A List, so yes, I technically do pay, but I get more than my money’s worth to be honest). A small letdown at the end of the day.
