The French Dispatch – La recensione

While it’s easy to pair Wes Anderson with a specific handlebar mustache, It would be unfair not to take credit for the Houston filmmaker for building over the years a wonderful and so well known poetic. Poetic by some and absent-minded always regarded as equal to itself, as Burton’s Poetic is, but in fact capable of making decisive developments where I am Tenenbaum NS Dog Island, just to take two examples far away in chronological order, they only share the most basic and vital components, yet remain roughly the opposite in terms of tone and balance.

Anderson’s early films owe, just to say, so much to Joe J. D. Salinger, that at the center of the story they always put New York families on top, quarrelsome brothers, and at least complicated father figures.

Over the years, these dynamics took on the thread of “accurately misleading” choral stories and then fizzled into a subtraction process that specifically led to Dog Island, where the relative simplicity of the scheme is counterbalanced by a very dense visual structure that pushes the language of beginnings to the limit. Every scene from this movie is overflowing with details, games, and engineering elements thrown in every direction, introducing the idea of ​​a giant diorama.

The good old press from yesterday

Dog IslandIn short, it’s a movie to watch and listen to even before you “read” it, and it also goes the same way French Dispatch of LibertyEvening sun, Kansas – From here only French Dispatch. Greeting for New Yorker By Harold Ross and William Schön (both journalists “summarized” in Bill Murray’s interpretation) The newspaper that bears its name, based in the French city of Aene-sur-Place, is in all respects a different vanity.

Depends on an anthological structure in style DecameronThe film begins with the death of director Arthur Howitzer Jr. (actually Murray) and presents the viewer with a selection of stories by way of essays.

The short introduction dedicated to the microcosm of Ennui-sur-Blasé – which provides the viewer with a spatial perspective – is followed by “The Concrete Masterpiece”, in which art historian J.K. L. Berensen (Tilda Swinton) explores the unique story of painter Moses Rosenthaler’s Revisions to Manifesto, the chronicle of the 1968 protests and, finally, “The Police Commissioner’s Private Dining Room,” a story of a kitchen that smells of the underworld.

Tra i Quattro, Episode 2 is also probably the most successful in terms of relatively classic mechanics, while others seemed to me mostly an aberration, to think of it a bit strange. Oddly enough, a film dedicated to journalism gives so little to write to completely leave itself on stage, unless you think of the tribute in terms of the graphic experience, rather than the “word.”

As I said, French Dispatch It is above all a movie that must be watched – carefully and perhaps several times – to appreciate every detail it offers while alternating between languagesviews and forms. There is less dynamic than there is Dog Island, This is correct; A little for the vivid formula, but above all for trying to reject the aesthetics and design of the magazine in cinematic terms, even before the contents.

Super marionette

Anderson unleashes a whirlwind of action, chain shots, and self-portraits around a cast of stars called to realize what perhaps remains the film’s most intriguing idea.

On the one hand, there are protagonists or storytellers, oriented above all in physical terms: they support the movements of the scene, follow paths, and more than words expressed through gestures, looks and sounds, the edge of the future.

On the other side is the inscription, dozens of inscriptions. Faces known to the audience appear even at the time of the shot, the movement, and the pose. In this second turn, the actors are transformed into points in space, into decorative elements, or are ‘degraded’ to objects and gears as in some of the works of Antonin Artaud or Antonio Reza.

in this meaning, French Dispatch It is the result of the work of subtracting or, better, reconfiguring the weights in favor of vision and hearing. The problem, if any, is that there was no guts to speed up the severe consequences, perhaps abandoning the classic narrative, also because the four stories are nothing exceptional and don’t properly open Murray’s character: the most elusive, yet the most interesting.

The French Dispatch will be released in theaters on November 11th.