Even the cast is heightened, so that the tiniest blink-and-you'll miss-it role is played by the likes of Willem Dafoe, Saoirse Ronan and Henry Winkler. A section will suddenly become a stage play, a comic-strip-style cartoon, a chat-show anecdote, or a lecture delivered in glorious style by Tilda Swinton in a shocking orange dress and a wig to match.Īdam Stockhausen's doll's-house production design is eye-wateringly precise, the black-and-white images of the city's ancient buildings (shot in Angouleme) deserve their own coffee table book, Alexandre Desplat's music keeps ticking and twinkling away, and the florid prose is so elaborate that the characters aren't hungry, they're "in a dire condition of calorific depletion". Not a scene goes by that hasn't been ornamented with a split screen, a freeze frame, a caption, a voice-over, a switch between monochrome and colour, or a change of the aspect radio. It makes The Grand Budapest Hotel look as if it was improvised over a weekend and shot with a smartphone. The French Dispatch has to be one of the most labour-intensive films in existence. It's not these outlines that count, though, so much as the painstaking ways in which they are filled in. And the third is a rollicking crime caper in which the son of a police chief (Mathieu Amalric) is kidnapped by a gangster (Edward Norton). The second story – the least satisfying of the three – is an account of a student radical (Timothée Chalamet) and the journalist (Frances McDormand) who ghost-writes his revolutionary manifesto. A smooth-talking art dealer (Adrien Brody) believes he has found the future of art, but it isn't easy to foster the career of someone in a high-security prison. While he is behind bars, he paints abstract portraits of the unsmiling warden (Léa Seydoux) he loves. The first is the raucous tale of a violent, bushy-bearded psychopath (Benicio del Toro) who happens to be a great artist. Then we are given a guided tour of the city by a cycling, beret-wearing Owen Wilson. First we meet the dedicated, eccentric editor, played by Bill Murray (who else?), and staff members played by Elisabeth Moss and Jason Schwartzman (one of three writers who helped Anderson with the plotting). The conceit is that they were all published in an English-language magazine which is edited in the punningly-named fictional French city of Ennui-sur-Blasé, but which is attached to an American newspaper based in Kansas. The film is an anthology of three whimsical short stories set in France in the mid-20th Century. Other viewers will walk out or switch off in a matter of minutes. Some viewers will watch it 100 times, and spot new little details every time. It's Anderson distilled, Anderson squared, Anderson to the nth degree. His long-awaited portmanteau, which premiered in Cannes on Monday, is the most Anderson of all Anderson films. Well, The French Dispatch isn't going to change your mind. You probably know, too, whether you love his work or hate it. Within seconds, you spot the symmetrical compositions, the horizontal camera moves, the blocks of garish colour, the sans-serif lettering, the arch, wordy, vaguely melancholy humour and all the other elements that distinguish his comedies from everyone else's. When you're watching a Wes Anderson film, you know it.
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