The French Dispatch

Recommendation

I found this movie very charming and would certainly recommend it. I am a sucker for Wes Anderson films and this was no exception. The French Dispatch is very funny without many outright jokes and is visually pleasing in the standard Wes Anderson style. It is made up of several view points and individual stories with a binding narrative that pulls things together just well enough that the movie as a whole feels coherent.

I would recommend this to anyone who is already a Wes Anderson fan, but I wouldn’t necessarily suggest this if you are new to Wes Anderson. It is very stylized and if you don’t like the style you won’t like the film. It also has a lot of absurdist humor which is not for everyone. If you are new to Wes Anderson films, I might suggest watching a different one first (perhaps The Grand Budapest Hotel) before diving into this one.

Thoughts

If you’ve seen the movie or if you don’t mind spoilers, read on.

The Framing Device

Wes Anderson seems to be following a pattern of not only choosing a story to tell, but also choosing a medium, apart from film, in which to tell it. In The Grand Budapest Hotel, the story was framed similarly to a novel. This film is unmistakably a magazine. This decision to frame the story in this way made the entire thing more immersive and centered the journalist themes.

The only real issue I had with the film is that it didn’t commit 100% to this framing. The one portion of the film I disliked (more on this later) was towards the end where the magazine perspective is discarded somewhat and the storytelling becomes more difficult to follow.

The Artist

I enjoyed how the dynamic between the artist prisoner character (Benicio Del Toro) and the female prison guard (Léa Seydoux) is played out when their characters are first introduced. The first scene is the platonic idea of what it means to “subvert expectations” in a pleasing way. We’ve all seen the setting before, a rich asshole artist uses his position of power to take liberties with a young female assistant. In this scenario, however, the scene ends with a complete power dynamic reversal with him entering a straightjacket and being carted away back to a cell. Something about that, although not overtly funny, struck a humorous cord with me all the same.

The Art

I appreciated the various commentaries about modern art. There’s a funny piece of dialogue on the “a third grader could have made this” idea that often comes up when discussing modern art. The art critic (Adrien Brody) is arguing for the artist’s validity and makes the claim that because he has technical prowess (the ability to draw a realistic picture of a bird) his more modern style is also good art. The sort of mental gymnastics that the art collectors go through to justify why the art is the next best thing works as a commentary on art in general in a way I liked.

The Revolutionary Students

I have quite a soft spot for chess, so the sections of the magazine following the student revolutionary movement that centered around a chess game were particularly entertaining to me. I appreciate how that portion of the movie puts you in the shoes of a student. The parents are all concerned about how much of a bother the revolution is, but for the students its life or death.

The Dinner Party Kidnapping

I felt the storyline where the author recounts his participation in a dinner party and the subsequent kidnapping of the the host’s son was honestly the weakest part of the film. To be clear, it’s not the entire section, just mainly the climax when it shifts to a cartoon style. For me it’s a combination of not really liking that cartoon style (and this is partially why I haven’t made it through Isle of Dogs yet despite the fact that on the surface it seems like a perfect fit for me.) The other issue I have is that it is too many layers removed from the original framing device at that point.

The story is told in the setting of a section of the magazine, but also in retrospective as spoken by the author on the set of a talk show. The actual content of the story has aspects of live action and cartoon. The cartoon scenes feel nested within the live action for a total depth of 4 levels removed from the viewer. It just makes things a little difficult to follow. That style of storytelling can work: I loved If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italio Calvino which relies heavily on this nesting of view points, but the first chapter of that book is incredibly jarring as you get accustomed to the style.

The section isn’t long enough to have time to get over that jarring feeling or to orient yourself. As a stand alone short it might work, but its presence in this larger narrative makes it feel especially awkward tonally. This discordance is the main reason I feel this movie is more of a 4/5 than a perfect 5/7.