Wes Anderson
The French Dispatch

There were moments, and not a few, when my eyes bounced back and forth on the images like pinballs. My gaze didn't quite know where to linger, so many were the elements worthy of attention in the carefully constructed scenes by Wes Anderson. I wished I could watch those passages again, right away, to fully savor their richness: characters scattered everywhere, unrealistic sets, buildings, airplanes, streets, prisons, a city that thrives on individuals and choral moments, dining rooms, cells, museums, three stories, told by three particularly capricious journalists prone to digression.

A constellation of interludes, narrative overlaps, frames, jumps back and forth. And then a language full of convolutions, poetic or farcical moments, played out between dialogues on the verge of delirium and sophisticated narrating voices. An (at least) infinite array of aesthetic games, precious gifts given freely, an aesthetical wrangling that knows no respite. Cinema as the whim of a genius who wouldn't even consider telling a story in a plain, linear way. Because first and foremost, he is telling his own story, his art that devours everything and returns it with an unmistakable watermark.

And again, the emotional use of the alternation between color and black and white, music that interacts with events in often surprising ways, a gallery of eye-rubbing actors who almost seem to be acting as themselves, so perfectly measured are they for the parts, a series of references to three or four fields of journalism captured with insight and irony in the many distorting windows of the narrative matryoshka that is this film. A fun editorial framework that is a stratagem for sewing together stories that, only in appearance, have nothing in common. It requires careful reading, and amidst such a wealth, it’s easy to get lost, but Wes lays out a series of events not only and not just to juxtapose aesthetic artifices and quirky characters.

As he demonstrates with his art, here more outwardly than ever, the director seeks in the unsycophantic chronicles of the French Dispatch a freedom of expression, a necessity to tell even the unforeseen, the collateral issues, the less edifying contexts and subplots, or even the more entertaining recesses of a reality that can appear dramatic, which are evidently being lost. His praise, which more than once borders on the incomprehensible, is all directed at deviance, which is ultimately the highest form of art. The necessity to obsessively delve deeper to truly understand, to enjoy life and its simulacra, the need for art to require from its consumers a maximum, extreme, almost unbearable commitment, to truly be art.

In the magazine's pieces, in the unrestrained narratives, as well as in Anderson's cinematic art, there is an underlying concept that perhaps today may seem indigestible: the rejection of simplification, the desperate need to add elements and interpretative keys, perspectives, verbal and visual languages, to enrich (even through a complication that at first might repel) what an author intends to tell.

This film is a provocation, a cascade of art to say no to the impoverishment threatening cinema like journalism, literature. In just over an hour and a half, there is more technique, vision, music, sophisticated words, ironic games, acting, stories of human exceptionalism, and intertwined references to the world (real or cinematic) of entire TV series, dozens of them, piled up, or other freeze-dried products for distracted viewing. Here instead, the view will exhaust you, then you'll ask for more.