‘The French Dispatch’ or — Watery Stools?
‘The French Dispatch’ (2021) could be viewed as a wonderful, intelligent and charming film… if it had been made a precocious teenage asshole who had just discovered the films of Tati and Godard, thought cliché equalled originality, mistook verbiage for eloquence and was two weeks into an art course and wanted everyone to know it as loudly as possible. God, I hate the films of Wes Anderson.
I hate them because, with the exception of the delightful ’The Grand Budapest Hotel’ (2014), his films are so insufferable that they make my eyes roll about in my head like I’m a malfunctioning pinball machine, so when ‘The French Dispatch’ informed me that the movie takes place in the French city of Ennui on the river Blasé I had to search the cinema floor to find them because they had violently rolled out of their sockets and were pinging about between the seats and making a racket. Is this a love letter to France or is this Anderson being condescending and flippant to foreign places again?
The film is structured like a magazine, which is a stupid idea because films aren’t magazines (it’s harder to wipe your bum with a movie for one thing). The film contains three separate stories contributed by three different writers for The French Dispatch and each of them contains elements of interest and elements of tedium, but it’s the tedium that wins out. Each writer narrates their own piece so there’s a constant voice-over to the visuals. The only problem is these voice-overs are staggeringly dull, frequently redundant and obliviously overwritten. The effect is that, no matter how interesting Anderson’s visuals are that the entire movie feels caked in a coating of sonic, verbal sludge (it’s ironic that in a film celebrating journalists and writers that the one aspect this film’s script needed more than anything else was a ruthless editor). This is nothing but verbal diarrhea but of a refined kind, as though Anderson at least had the courtesy of eating well before he squats over our chests and gives us all a cinematic hot-lunch.
Anderson’s obsessive use of symmetrical composition, bold colours and camera moves is as grating, annoying and creatively bankrupt as ever as Anderson continues to use Godard’s technique of lateral camera-moves, the way Anderson does in almost every single one of this movies, except they’re devoid of any genuine meaning other than declaring an empty stylistic intent. This could be why I find Anderson’s film so smug, shallow and facile — because they are! This superficiality (what, if anything, does this film have to say?) means ‘The French Dispatch contains no drama or tension outside of sitting there wondering when this fucking thing is going to end.
Yet what’s really baffling about Wes Anderson is the fact that in over twenty years of filmmaking that his style and approach to cinema hasn’t changed one iota in all that time: the camera moves are exactly, if not PRECISELY, the same and you could take a still from any one of his movies from almost any point in his career and they’d all be practically interchangeable. It’s the most limited, if not nonexistent, growth I’ve ever seen in any art form.
I think that’s why, ultimately, I find Wes Anderson’s movies so irritating. It’s not their condescending hipsterisms (the guy is middle-aged now so he should really have grown out of a lot of what he’s up to here), their self-congratulatory air or aggressive superficiality but the fact that his style has hardly changed or developed. He’s still playing the same three chords, the same monotonous riffs and in the same time signature with no radical progression in his entire career. In that respect he’s nothing more than the cinematic equivalent of Status Quo, except even more annoying, repetitive and dull.
