The film is set in the office of the fictional magazine The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun newspaper, whose staff create the final issue following the death of editor-in-chief, Arthur Howitzer Jr. The film’s narrative takes the form of an obituary, a travel guide, and three feature stories on art, May ’68, and cooking, respectively. The film is, according to Anderson, ostensibly about an American journalist ‘based in France [who] creates his magazine. It is more a portrait of this man.’ Except that it’s not, really. The character of Howitzer Jr, played in his usual wry style by Anderson regular Bill Murray, features only briefly in the marginal spaces between the stories. He lives the shadowy existence of the editor who lurks behind literary publications, and for whom the protection of journalistic freedom of expression is everything. His only directive to prospective writers is: ‘Just try to make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose.’

The French Dispatch was inspired by Anderson’s love for the New Yorker magazine, which he read in the library as an undergraduate at the University of Texas. The main characters are based on some of the magazine’s larger-than-life contributors. Anderson calls the film a ‘love letter to journalists’, and there is certainly love here, for writing, for reading, for editing and reportage; and nostalgia for the days of typewriters, pencils, notebooks (of the paper kind), and storyboards. The structure of the film too owes a debt to the literary or lifestyle magazine. This gives the film a rather uneven pace, intended no doubt to reflect the distracted browsing of a Sunday supplement. The first feature story, ‘The Concrete Masterpiece’, a sardonic take on the art world, is the best realised of the three, thanks largely to standout performances from Adrien Brody as an eccentric art dealer, Benicio Del Toro as a mad painter, Léa Seydoux as his prison-guard muse, and Tilda Swinton as a flamboyant art critic.

Elisabeth Moss, Owen Wilson, Tilda Swinton, Fisher Stevens, and Griffin Dunne in The French Dispatch (photograph courtesy of Searchlight Pictures).

It is no secret that Anderson is a Francophile (French cultural references appear in almost all his films) and no surprise that he set his latest in France, a spiritual home for the director. Anderson described the film’s setting, the fictional city of Ennui-sur-Blasé, as ‘like Paris but not as it is today – more a sort of memory of Paris’. It is a collective memory shaped by cinema itself, and the keen Francophile and cinephile will delight in the myriad of references, from 1930s French poetic realism and post-war French noir to the French New Wave and Hollywood ‘Frenchness films’ – enthusiastic celebrations of Paris that poured out of post-war America and blurred the lines between popular culture and high art. The travel guide by the cycling reporter Herbsaint Sazerac (Owen Wilson) introduces the city and establishes Anderson’s nostalgic vision of Paris: abattoirs, streetwalkers, shopkeepers, pickpockets, working-class and student quartiers, seamy characters, and gritty locales, all filtered through a typically charming Anderson aesthetic. It is a style often parodied, yet Anderson has a gift for creating filmic worlds which are both reassuring and symmetrical, and characters who are likeable even when they are villains. The move to large ensemble casts has also become a hallmark of Anderson’s later films, and it is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, wonderful actors seem under-utilised (Elisabeth Moss has two lines and about the same number of minutes on screen); on the other, Anderson gets a lot out of a little with his actors, with many of whom he has worked before, some several times. His ability to cast actors with distinctive faces imbues his characters – who otherwise might lapse into caricature – with appeal and pathos.

The fictional ‘Ennui-sur-Blasé’ is less a city than a state of mind or attitude typically associated with the French. Loosely translated as boredom or restlessness, ennui is a term long associated with French modernity, particularly the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, and viewers may experience both emotional responses during the film. Yet, as Walter Benjamin remarked: ‘Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.’ The French Dispatch is certainly an experience; one tends to drift in and out of the narratives, the threads of which are not important and probably not even intended to be followed. For Benjamin, the city is experienced in a state of distraction; it surprises us as memories or daydreams are sparked by chance encounters, fragments, and juxtapositions. Anderson’s palimpsestic film is a timeless meander through a phantasmagorical Paris that catches us off guard and sets us dreaming. 

The French Dispatch (Searchlight Pictures), 103 minutes, is currently screening.