French Letters

I've been having a little trouble finding movies that I want to watch lately, so I was pretty happy whn I realized that The French Dispatch (2021) was available. I'd kind of forgotten about it. 

It takes the form of an anthology movie, or a movie about an anthology of magazine articles. The magazine in question is the French Dispatch, a supplement of the Liberty Kansas Evening Sun. It seems that Bill Murray, son of the publisher of the small Evening Sun newspaper, went to France to publish a literary review, probably to keep him out of his father's hair.

Now Murray has died. His final wish is that the magazine should close down, and last issue be his obituary. But first, let's meet some of the staff and writers, and hear about some of their articles.

First, is Owen Wilson, who gives us a bike tour of the town the Dispatch writes about, Ennui-sur-Blase. It's a small town that resembles Paris in the 50s (?). The flophouse quarter is full of pickpockets, the river (Blase?) is full of corpses, and there is a large, medieval-looking prison and insane asylum. 

The first full article is about an inmate of the prison, Benicio del Toro. It is written by Tilda Swinton, Dispatch art critic, who narrates as part of a lecture series. Del Toro is a large, quiet artist, who killed a few men in a bar fight. In prison, he drinks alcoholic mouthwash and paints a guard, Lea Seydoux, who poses nude. Adrien Brody is an art dealer who thinks del Toro could be a lucrative investment - on the strength of one painting, he inspires an art movement. But when his magnum opus is revealed, it turns out to be a series of abstract frescos on the prison walls - frescos which are bound to the wall and un-sellable. 

The next story features Frances McDormand as an acerbic, single journalist during the revolutionary French 1960s. While the youth riot in streets, mostly in support of male students being able to visit the women's dorms, her friends try to set her up with a normal single guy (Christoph Waltz). But she starts an affair with their son, Timothee Chalamet, who wrote a manifesto for the movement. She also edits the manifesto - she is a writer. Cute Lyna Khoudri is another leader of the movement, but a more practical and self-assured one. She scoffs at Chalamet's manifesto, his romantic ideals, and the undemocratic way he invited McDormand into the fold. After Chalamet's attempt to settle the riot with a chess match vs. the police chief fails, McDormand advises the young man and woman to forget their political differences and sleep together, which they do.

The last piece has Jeffery Wright, as an erudite, gay black man on a talk show. He is the Dispatch's food critic. He tells the story of celebrity chef Stephen Park, whose speciality is cuisine policier, food for policemen. The story is how his cooking frees the kidnapped son of a police comissaire. The story is told with expansive digressions and fillips of language, and seems to have little to do with food criticism. But Murray asks him to add one little detail that Wright withheld - how the poison he created and purposefully ate tasted: a taste few have lived to tell about.

Each of these stories has it's own flavor: The first, has a desaturated prison palette, except for the hot pink paintings, and the cuts to Swinton's lecture series (with personal/sexual asides). The second has a rather French New Wave feel, both in the lo-fi style (including black and white sections) and youth culture content. I identified McDormand as inspired by Joan Didion, for her dry, depressive, spare style. But I was wrong, it was really based on Mavis Gallant, who I had never heard of. Guess I don't read enough New Yorker, which is what this is all a take on. Of course, the last one is based on James Baldwin, with Wright even looking very much the part. 

I've left out most of the jokes - the clever names, like Herbsaint Sazerac for Owen Wilson, or Zeffirelli for Chalamet, or Nescaffier for Park's chef. There are some wild set pieces, like scenes from the musical made of Zeffireli's movement. The way each story is a framed in the anthology, then framed again in a lecture or David-Frost-style talk show is also fun.

So I enjoyed this a ton, but did get the feeling that this is a minor Wes Anderson movie. It's not just the anthology, it's also the way it is always deflating itself. It's not about the biggest literary magazine in America, it's about the foreign supplement to a small Kansas newspaper, from a medium-sized French city. The youth revolution that McDormand is covering isn't about war or capitalism, it's about boys visiting the girl's dorms. So don't expect too much. Of course, Anderson tends to make fluffy confections, but you do find depth if you care to look. Either way, you always find entertainment.