The French Dispatch (2021) - Wes Anderson’s mayhem comes together in glorious anthology

Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch rings like an anthology of snippets, a mosaic of tales taken from its central town, Ennui-sur-Blasé. With his impressive recurring cast of A-listers and newcomers, Anderson’s films in my eyes have often lacked in plot, switching back and forth between minor characters and relying solely on attractive backdrops and eccentric style. In The French Dispatch however, perhaps he has found a way to make all of his stories as wonderful as the latter. The award-winner, sporting yet again Anderson’s protégées alongside some talented newcomers, frames three shorts within the context of a magazine, the eponymous French Dispatch, whose editor in chief (Bill Murray) has recently died. The stories are three of the articles in its final edition, written by his most talented writers, “his people”. Anderson’s cinematography and décor are as fresh as ever, the precise, meticulous and colourful bonanza as we know and recognise him, but the anthology format also means that each and every one of his actors have their moment to shine, be it in Tilda Swinton’s tale of an artistic genius, incarcerated for double homicide, Frances McDormand’s report on student revolution led by Timothée Chalamet, or Jeffrey Wright’s chronicle of a chef’s heroic actions after the police chief’s son is abducted. Some lack in finesse no doubt, but the all-round effect of the film is absolute enthrallment, joy and a hint of nostalgia for a postcard France, most notably in McDormand’s section, evocative of the 1968 revolutions and at times, of Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers in its dichotomy between revolutionary and sexual passion. Anderson’s usual apathetic acting style returns, yet The French Dispatch sometimes lets its actors run riot, if only for a sentence or two: there is Juliette, the revolutionary teenager who fights alongside Chalamet, whose arduous passion for the cause sometimes breaks from the expressionless passivity usually attributed to Anderson’s style. Perhaps it is that some of the stories are a little lacking in something still, but there is real cinema at play here, a beautiful, heartfelt ode to writing and to storytelling that echoes long after the final obituary to the editor in chief.