You could hardly throw a cast like that at something so lovely and not generate discrete pleasures. Must the images work quite so hard at overworking romanticised clichés of the French experience? Pepé Le Pew cartoons offer a more nuanced version of Gallic life than we get here The final episode casts Jeffrey Wright, apparently inclining towards James Baldwin, as a food writer caught up in an extravagant kidnapping that plays out like a less zippy episode from Tintin. The second stars flailing Timothée Chalamet as a student revolutionary who, during les événements of 1968, becomes entangled with journalist Frances McDormand. The first features Benicio del Toro as a jailed artist, who takes prison guard Léa Seydoux as his muse. Instead it focuses on just three yarns, none of which quite justifies its relatively modest length. Featuring a fulgent array of stars, flitting from framing sequences in the US to core narratives in France, the picture promises a kaleidoscope of narrative. The usual problem with anthology films is that no story is given a chance to properly breathe. Alexandre Desplat’s jaunty score nods towards that director’s magnificent foolishness. An early shot offers a variation on the famous exterior of an elegantly scruffy building in Tati’s Mon Oncle.
Set at various points in the three decades after the second World War, the picture clearly has its eye on the nouvelle vague, but it owes at least as much to Jacques Tati as it does to François Truffaut. It requires something like genius – on his part and those of his collaborators – to get such a complex machine whirring so smoothly. None of this is to suggest that Anderson’s achievements are superficial. Photograph: Searchlight Pictures/Twentieth Century Fox One imagines oneself leafing pleasurably through the pages, admiring the photos, approving the layout, feeling the quality of the paper, before casting it aside and remarking: “But there is nothing to read here.”Įlisabeth Moss (from left to right), Owen Wilson, Tilda Swinton, Fisher Stevens and Griffin Dunne in The French Dispatch. Paying yet another tribute to the New Yorker, Anderson gives us the cinematic correlative of a stylish American magazine’s reporting on mid-20th-century France. The problem here is that, whereas all the elements of style are in place – disciplined set design, beautifully balanced colours, cautious camera moves, elegant typography – The French Dispatch lacks the momentum of The Grand Budapest Hotel or the poignancy of The Royal Tenenbaums. Is it reasonable to accuse a film-maker of being too like himself? After all, you wouldn’t mistake Vertigo for the work of anyone but Alfred Hitchcock, and that unsettling thriller has weathered the years pretty well. As the boos and the cheers faded after the Cannes premiere of Wes Anderson’s latest, critics began squabbling among themselves about a near-theological issue (this sounds rather like an incident from the film under consideration).
0 kommentar(er)
