The French capital is now called Ennui-sur-Blasé.

That's a bit silly, but Wes Anderson's films are often silly - in their cuteness, in their artificiality, in their kind of caricature.

Some love them for exactly that, others may think they are blasé or even boring for that very reason - and perhaps Anderson, one of the most self-referential directors of all, is addressing such critics ironically with the city name.

Jan Wiele

Editor in the features section.

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So the over-Paris, with its crazy metro network (the plan is a work of art), its sky-blue Citroëns and raven-black pickpocket alleys, was recreated in Angoulême - in the capital of comics, so named because of its festival, probably not by chance.

Because Anderson films not only often work according to a comic aesthetic made up of well-composed individual images that, if paused, could be interpreted for hours, but they even have, in this case too, passages in which the fictional film turns into the cartoon, becoming completely surreal to act.

Immerse yourself in the hidden object

Most of his films focus on a building or a structure with different chambers - “The Grand Budapest Hotel” (2014), the house of the “Royal Tenenbaums” (2001) or the excursion ship Belafonte in “The Deep Sea Divers” (2004). During tracking shots that blow up all the walls, the life taking place in parallel in the chambers is shown in a hidden object manner. Now here it is a newspaper editorial department, which is represented in this way and gives the film its title: "The French Dispatch". This fictional newspaper is Anderson's homage to magazine journalism of the 20th century: elements of the New Yorker, the Paris Review and the British Criterion are reflected in the Dispatch. The editor-in-chief of Dispatch (played by Bill Murray) is inspired by Harold Ross, the founder of the New Yorker.

The plot of the film serves as an alibi for Anderson to tell three fairytale episodes, which could be based on articles on very different subjects: about the art critic JKL Berensen (Tilda Swinton) and a mad painter who is in prison (Benicio del Toro) and his caretaker (Léa Seydoux) banned into a masterpiece of abstract art entitled "Simone, Naked, Cell Block J. Hobby Room"; about love at the time of the student revolt of 1968 in a triangle made up of Timothée Chalamet, Lyna Khodri and Frances McDormand or about an absurd child abduction that is ended by a police chef. All of the episodes have the typical Anderson mixture of slapstick comedy and bitter seriousness, which in its mysteriousness often lingers for a long time.

Anderson expressly makes visual bows to the cinema of a De Sica, Renoir, Truffaut, Godard and many others, who are listed in a lovingly designed press booklet on a long list of recommended films. But that's not all: Anderson's script also arises from a journalistic-writing universe that ranges from Janet Flanner and Joseph Mitchell to James Thurber and James Baldwin (Jeffrey Wright plays the eccentric Roebuck Wright, who is a mixture of Baldwin and Tennessee Williams) . The far from complete list of role models for characters makes it clear that Anderson is pursuing a kind of didactic-encyclopedic approach with this work, which one can perhaps compare with Bob Dylan's audition of a cultural-historical canon in "Murder Most Foul":In a present in which, despite gigantic archives, many younger people are no longer aware of a lot, both are concerned with capturing and preserving cultural achievements, always in the mode of dreamily exaggerated memories or sometimes even parody.

A guest appearance by Jarvis Cocker

This applies not least to a character who appears almost exclusively acoustically in the film: Britpop singer Jarvis Cocker slips into the role of the fictional chansonnier Tip-Top, who is supposed to remember the singer Christophe, who died in 2020.

Cocker must have liked the role so much that he recorded an entire album with “Chansons d'Ennui Tip-Top” and pays homages on it, for example to the smoky, lascivious chant by Serge Gainsbourg.

The album appears parallel to the film, whose soundtrack by Alexandre Desplat otherwise relies on the orchestral jazz music that has proven itself at Anderson.

No question: Understanding this film in all its allusions requires work, as art sometimes does.

But it could be very nice work.

A simple message that recurs with Wes Anderson and that shines through here in very different ways is: You have to make an effort and be very careful about everything.

Then something beautiful can arise.