Visionary? Eccentric? Narcissus? More innovator or style master? Wes Anderson is, quite simply, the most elegant and recognizable of contemporary directors. Like Fellini, illustrator of a world that requires an initial effort to enter and understand but ultimately magnificent e equipped as a luxury penthouse. The box office is the least of his thoughts. Think of the original title of his latest film, The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun. Mileage, bizarre, courageous. Talk about the magazine The French Dispatch, a weekly supplement to the daily imagery Evening Sun, drawn up in an imaginary place in France, Ennui-sur-Blasé.
Not a snobbish praise of the press, but a collection of facts. Small Time.news transfigured in a surreal key: representation of existential theater. In the center, the newspaper’s editor, Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Bill Murray), who turned a series of travel columns into a magazine about world politics, the arts and “all that is of human interest”. For this he gathered a team of foreign journalists and brought out, through characters, phobias, rebellions, the portrait of a community, of an entire country, of a group of special people.
Chess games, paintings, prison, mustaches and vertical houses. Three episodes. The concrete masterpiece, inspired by a 1951 article about an artist who was sentenced to life in prison. Revisions to a manifesto, an investigation into the student protests of 1968. The Police Commissioner’s private dining room, where there is talk of a kidnapping solved by a cook. The style is that of Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), with the legendary The New Yorker as a recognized model of good cultural information. The cast is formidable: Timothée Chalamet, Benicio del Toro, Adrien Brody, Tilda Swinton, Léa Seydoux, Owen Wilson, Elisabeth Moss, Frances McDormand. With all those stars it feels like being in a Woody Allen movie in its heyday. And the good news is that everyone is at the service of the stories they are a tiny part of.
“Message from the head printer: there is an hour left to go to print.” “Well, boy: you’re fired. And don’t cry in my room. ‘ Howitzer’s reporters are solid, unconventional, even funny. The facts of the citizens are made, riots in the streets are told, kidnappings, intriguing stories of police cooking and “aromas that cast a spell destined to be mortally broken”. The result is a lively, stubborn, moody media anthology. Half of the film is in black and white, underlining Anderson’s aesthetic vocation. The covers of the magazine multiply and do wow! They mark the rhythm of the film, connect the passages, the register changes, the concatenation of the images, with that brushstroke layout, made up of obsessive connections, straight hair, matching geometries, small reportages. An architect’s cinema, fast, buttery and sometimes overabundant. But excess is also an element of overall success for Anderson.
THE FRENCH DISPATCH di Wes Anderson
(USA-Germany-France-United Kingdom, 2021, duration 108 ‘)
con Timothée Chalamet, Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, Léa Seydoux, Benicio del Toro, Adrien Brody, Frances McDormand
Rating: **** out of 5
In the halls
November 13, 2021 | 08:44
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