The French
Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun is a 2021 American comedy-drama
anthology film written, directed, and produced by Wes Anderson from a story he
conceived with Roman Coppola, Hugo Guinness, and Jason Schwartzman. The film
stars an ensemble cast featuring Benicio del Toro, Adrien Brody, Tilda Swinton,
Léa Seydoux, Frances McDormand, Timothée Chalamet, Lyna Khoudri, Jeffrey
Wright, Mathieu Amalric, Stephen Park, Bill Murray, and Owen Wilson. Its plot
follows three different storylines as the French foreign bureau of a fictional
Kansas newspaper creates its final issue.
Additional
cast members in The French Dispatch include Liev Schreiber, Edward Norton,
Willem Dafoe, Saoirse Ronan, Elisabeth Moss, Jason Schwartzman, and Anjelica
Huston. The project was first mentioned in August 2018 as an untitled musical
set after World War II. That December, the film was officially announced, with
Anderson calling it a "love letter to journalists." Filming took
place between November 2018 and March 2019, with cinematographer Robert Yeoman,
in the city of Angoulême, France. During post-production, editing was completed
by Andrew Weisblum and the musical score was composed by Alexandre Desplat.
Following a
delay from 2020, The French Dispatch had its world premiere at the Cannes Film
Festival on July 12, 2021, and was theatrically released in the United States
by Searchlight Pictures on October 22, 2021. The film received generally
positive reviews from critics, with praise for the production design and performances.
Wes Anderson’s Dream of France, and the Paris I
Remember
With “The French Dispatch,” the director’s latest, yet
another American artist falls under the country’s spell. The Times’s Paris
bureau chief recalls when the same thing happened to him.
By Roger
Cohen
Published
Oct. 28, 2021
Updated
Oct. 29, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/28/movies/french-dispatch-paris.html?searchResultPosition=2
PARIS — At
the premiere on Sunday before the release of his latest movie, “The French
Dispatch,” Wes Anderson stood onstage in a rumpled, brownish suit and told the
crowd packed into a Champs-Élysées theater, “I have a French air about me.” He
had, he said, “spent my whole life feeling I am in a French movie.”
Now this
artful Texan and sometime Parisian with a tousled Left-Bank look has made a
film so French that not a Gallic cliché is omitted. The trees are pollarded,
the shutters are largely drawn, the police tend toward Inspector Clouseau
look-alikes. The streets of the fictional town of Ennui-sur-Blasé — roughly
translated as Boredom-on-the-World-Weary — are dotted with rats beneath steeply
pitched zinc roofs, and, of course, the talk is of love and art and gastronomic
pleasure.
Ennui (a
word that conveys a peculiarly French sense of tedium mixed with spleen) is
home to The French Dispatch, an English-language magazine whose avowed
inspiration is The New Yorker. In Anderson’s telling, the fictional publication
existed between 1925 and 1975 under the editorship of a certain Arthur
Howitzer, Jr., who keeps as close an eye on his journalists’ expense reports as
on any redundant phrase in their copy. Howitzer is loosely modeled on Harold
Ross and William Shawn, the co-founder and longtime editor of the magazine that
“The French Dispatch” relocates from Manhattan.
The movie,
however, is scarcely about journalism, apart from the occasional musing of a
reporter named Lucinda Krementz (played by Frances McDormand and inspired by
Mavis Gallant and Lillian Ross) who covers a mock-up of the May 1968 student
uprising. “I should maintain journalistic neutrality,” she says. “If it
exists.”
Rather,
Anderson’s nostalgia-laced film is about an old subject: the American writer in
Paris. It evokes how French sensuality and style and beauty and surly realism —
so completely distinct from can-do American optimism and the functional
drabness of Main Street U.S.A. — can facilitate artistic reinvention and afford
the space to dream.
I arrived
in Paris in 1975, just as The French Dispatch was ending its life, and later
began work for a fortnightly American magazine called The Paris Metro, whose
brief but passionate life extended from 1976 to 1978. The tone was more Village
Voice than The French Dispatch, and it was a thrilling way to start in
journalism. I explored the redevelopment of the Les Halles wholesale food
market — then a gaping hole in the center of the city — and wrote about a
suburban warehouse disco that was drawing a chic crowd all the way from St.
Germain-des-Prés.
The whiff
of garlic, sauvignon blanc and Gauloises was still strong on the early-morning
subway and there was still a horse butcher on every other block. At The Paris
Metro, we all thought we were living a charmed life, however straitened our
individual circumstances might be. Heck, Parisians, whatever their
sophistication, needed tough, raw American journalism to see their city and
culture anew. The magazine was a popular success that might have benefited from
Howitzer’s attention to expense accounts.
I discovered
that, despite appearances, I was born an outsider. France was liberating, just
as the movies of Godard, Renoir, Truffaut and Varda clearly were for Anderson.
They were guides to unimagined possibility, so different in pacing and theme
and structure from much of Hollywood.
Theft may
be a tribute, just as cultural difference may be a stimulant. The French phrase
“Bof, c’est normal” — “bof” is an untranslatable French verbal shrug —
fascinated me, so, at The Paris Metro, I wrote about the French reluctance to
be shocked by any human antics, all waved away as “normal.” A short story
called “A Slit Skirt” about a vagrant exploring the underside of Paris found
its way into print but is probably best forgotten. Still, it reflected a young
man’s urge to create, with Paris as the perfect backdrop.
If good
cheap food and wine were everywhere in those late ’70s days, beauty also
overflowed: the wide bright sky on the banks of the Seine, the low-slung
bridges with their subtle fulcrums, the golden domes and verdigris statuary,
the streets that beckoned and the boulevards that summoned, the overflowing
markets and the islands pointing their prows at the river. Paris seemed
unreasonably generous.
This French
generosity is alluded to in “The French Dispatch” with a wistful longing by
Roebuck Wright (played by Jeffrey Wright and loosely modeled on James Baldwin
and A.J. Liebling), who appears in the fourth and last of the short episodes
that make up the movie. He started, as he tells Howitzer, in “fires and
murders,” but has moved on to the intrigues of gastronomy. He embarks on an
investigation of the table of the chief of the municipal police, whose chef,
Mr. Nescaffier (Steve Park), has earned a certain renown with his Blasé city
park pigeon hash, among other delicacies.
Journalism
can be lonely, but Wright describes how invariably, on some French street, he
would find “a table set for me” with its bottle of wine — “my solitary feast,
my comrade.” France has modernized, of course, but it has also resisted the
brand-obsessed homogenization of Anglophone countries. The comfort of that
table, and the solicitous service tended to it, remain something accessible
across France, as distinct as the unctuous yet mineral perfection of a
Gillardeau oyster.
Nescaffier,
the chef, is poisoned as the police chief tries to free his kidnapped son. On
his recovery, in a wonderful scene, he describes with rapture the flavor of the
toxic salts in the radishes — milky, peppery, spicy, not entirely unpleasant.
“A new flavor! A rare thing at my age!” he explains, with corpses strewn about.
Whether the
highly stylized, risibly mannered goings-on in Ennui-sur-Blasé are a mocking
pastiche of what Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude
Stein, James Baldwin and countless others found in the movable feast of France,
or a Francophile director’s loving paean to that tradition, is one of those
riddles that Anderson likes to play with. “I offer the film to France with
admiration and respect and a little envy,” he said. Perhaps that was a clue.
France
clearly has an emotional hold on the director. It was the French epicure
Brillat-Savarin who noted: “I have drawn the following inference, that the
limits of pleasure are as yet neither known nor fixed.” In food, as in love.
When, in the second story of the movie, the imprisoned painter Moses
Rosenthaler (played by Benicio del Toro) makes love to his prison guard and model,
identified only as Simone (Léa Seydoux), he murmurs to her “I love you.”
“I don’t
love you,” she says.
“Already?”
That French
realism never goes away.
I was
reminded of the scene in Godard’s “La Chinoise,” in which two young Maoist
revolutionaries — these are students with real heft and serious beliefs — are
also lovers. A scene consists of the young man saying “Je t’aime” and the young
woman saying “Je ne t’aime plus.” Some things just sound better in French, but,
OK, if you insist on a translation: “I love you,” “I no longer love you.”
Yes,
Anderson has stolen things, but immersed in the cornucopia of France, how could
he or any other American artist do otherwise?
Roger Cohen
is the Paris Bureau Chief of The Times. He was a columnist from 2009 to 2020.
He has worked for The Times for more than 30 years and has served as a foreign
correspondent and foreign editor. Raised in South Africa and Britain, he is a
naturalized American. @NYTimesCohen
Plot
Arthur
Howitzer Jr., the editor of the newspaper The French Dispatch, dies suddenly of
a heart attack. According to the wishes expressed in his will, publication of
the newspaper is immediately suspended following one final farewell issue, in
which three articles from past editions of the paper are republished, along
with an obituary.
The Cycling
Reporter - by Herbsaint Sazerac
Herbsaint
Sazerac delivers a cycling tour of the town of Ennui, demonstrating several key
areas such as the arcade, Le Sans Blague café and a pick-pocket's alleyway. He
compares the past and the present of each place, demonstrating how much has
changed and yet how little has changed in Ennui over time.
The
Concrete Masterpiece – by J.K.L. Berensen
Moses
Rosenthaler, a mentally disturbed artist serving a prison sentence for murder,
paints an abstract nude portrait of Simone, a prison officer with whom he
develops a burgeoning relationship. Julien Cadazio, an art dealer also serving
a sentence for tax evasion, is immediately taken by the painting after seeing
it in a prisoner art exhibition, and buys it despite Rosenthaler's protests.
Upon his release he convinces his family of art exhibitors to put it on
display, and Rosenthaler soon becomes a sensation in the art world, with his
paintings in high demand. Privately, Rosenthaler struggles with inspiration,
and devotes himself to a long-term project.
Three years
later, Cadazio and a mob of artists, angry at the lack of any further
paintings, bribe their way into the prison to force Rosenthaler to come up with
something, and discover that he has painted a series of frescoes in the prison
hall. Angered that the paintings are irremovable from the prison, Cadazio gets
into a physical altercation with Rosenthaler, but soon comes to appreciate the
paintings for what they are, and later arranges for the entire room to be
airlifted out of the prison into a private museum. For his actions in halting a
prison riot that breaks out during the reveal of the paintings, Rosenthaler is
released on probation.
Revisions
to a Manifesto – by Lucinda Krementz
Lucinda
Krementz reports on a student protest breaking out in the streets of Ennui that
soon boils over into the "Chessboard Revolution". Despite her
insistence on maintaining "journalistic integrity", she has a brief
romance with Zeffirelli, a self-styled leader of the revolt, and secretly helps
him write his manifesto and adds an appendix. Juliette, a fellow revolutionary,
is unimpressed with his manifesto. After they briefly express their
disagreement about its contents, Krementz tells the two to "go make
love," which they do.
A few weeks
later, Zeffirelli is killed attempting repairs on a small radio tower serving
as a revolutionary pirate radio station, and soon a photograph of his likeness
becomes symbolic of the movement.
The Private
Dining Room of the Police Commissioner – by Roebuck Wright
During a
television interview, Roebuck Wright recounts the story of his attending a
private dinner with The Commissaire of the Ennui police force, prepared by
legendary police officer-slash-chef Lt. Nescaffier. The dinner is disrupted
when the Commissaire's son Gigi is kidnapped and held for ransom by criminals.
After a series of interrogations, the police discover the kidnapper's hideout
and begin a stakeout. Following a shootout, Gigi manages to sneak out a message
in Morse code to "send the cook". Lt. Nescaffier is sent into the
kidnappers' hideout, ostensibly to provide both them and Gigi with food, but
secretly the food is laced with poison. The criminals all succumb to the
poison, along with Lt. Nescaffier after being made to test it first, but one
criminal escapes with Gigi, and leads the police on a chase. Gigi manages to
escape out of the sunroof and jumps into the police car. At the French Dispatch
office, Howitzer tells Wright to re-insert a segment in which a recovering Lt.
Nescaffier tells Wright that the taste of the poison was unlike anything he had
ever eaten before.
In an
epilogue, the French Dispatch staff mourn Howitzer's death, but set to work
putting together a final issue to honor his memory.
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