Wes Anderson tells French stories

Wes Anderson has two loves: his country and Paris. It’s been a long time since the director of Austin Texas has been spending time in his Paris apartment. He loves French culture, he knows it well, he pays homage to it in The French Dispatch, putting in images of stories published by a fictitious weekly yet inspired not by a French gazette, as the title of the film might suggest, but by The New Yorker.

Wes Anderson discovered the legendary American magazine, almost 100 years old, when he was a high school student, he collected it, he has hundreds of bound copies. With The French Dispatch, which hits theaters this Wednesday, we are comfortably installed in the wonderful and sophisticated cinematographic world of Wes Anderson, recognizable among all.

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Everything is here

Everything is there, what distinguishes the director from The Tenenbaum Family and The Grand Budapest Hotel : unique whimsical tone; tale in perpetual motion riddled with visual gags; relentless attention to detail; dapper and retro colors which stylize a vintage cinema enriched this time with a frank black and white. We will add his crazy obsession with symmetry.

Everything is there in the typical frame of Anderson’s cinema, and in this world which seems to belong only to him, to be his own creation, as refined as it is extravagant. The French Dispatch However, it looks like a funny hybrid cultural object. Wes Anderson appearing to leaf through the best stories of an imaginary American weekly, speaks of France through the accounts of exiled reporters.

Anderson evokes the France of the art world, the France of May 1968, the France of gastronomy – his character Nescaffier is the tasty double of the great cook Escoffier. The great history is summoned in this anthology of small stories, which are as many sketches sketches of French culture.

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The absurdity of the world

Wes Anderson tells it through quirky, absurd, burlesque characters, and as always, often depressed and traumatized, when they’re not weird. One of the most incredible castings in cinema meets there: his usual troupe, Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and Frances McDormand, joined by Timothée Chalamet, Elisabeth Moss, Benicio del Toro and Jeffrey Wright. .

We also needed a French cast to root these French-style stories with us: Léa Seydoux, Mathieu Amalric, Denis Menochet, Benjamin Lavernhe, Guillaume Gallienne, Hippolyte Girardot, Lyna Khoudri, or in Félix Moati are on the bill. The French Dispatch.

It all takes place in an invented French town, called Ennui-sur-Blasé, with a funny name that speaks volumes about the film’s sweet irony, and the way it emphasizes the absurdity of the world.

Old Angoulême was not used by chance in this whimsical and whimsical comedy: Angoulême is the French capital of comics, and there is still in the cinema of Wes Anderson, who has also made animated films , a cartoonish spirit.

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