Movies A Cannes away from Cannes: fewer movies, but also fewer COVID tests The dispatch of the title is an American-staffed expatriate paper based in Ennui-sur-Blasé, overseen (of course) by a bumbling Bill Murray an editorial features meeting yields the three tall tales that lend the film its nominal shape. Here he gets to flit at his own distracted pace between well-appointed vignettes. Wholly familiar as it is in design and detail, “The French Dispatch” does represent something new for the 52-year-old filmmaker, deploying the same flighty anthology structure that the Coen Brothers recently tried to variable effect in “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.” On the face of it, that should be a good fit for Anderson, a filmmaker who has always been less a master storyteller than a supreme fashioner of story worlds. In Anderson’s best films, “The Grand Budapest Hotel” and “The Royal Tenenbaums” among them, palpable human stakes lend ballast to all that hyper-controlled formal frippery in his most disposable ones, the rueful strains of Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?” creep into mind. Fans of the director will find all the usual surface pleasures of his work fastidiously in place: immaculate, era-straddling production design preserved in the crystalline symmetry of his compositions, an A-plus-list ensemble of actors on droll, freewheeling form, and a spritzy jazz piano score (by the eminently French Alexandre Desplat) that immediately and insistently carves out space in your brain.īut I smiled more than I laughed and, if I’m being honest, I sighed more than I smiled. Bracketed by more charged, challenging propositions like Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov’s whirling pandemic fantasia “Petrov’s Flu” or Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s quietly probing three-hour Murakami adaptation “Drive My Car,” a relatively short, jaunty little palate-cleanser like “The French Dispatch” goes down very easily.Īnd yet, as Anderson’s ornate triptych of mini-capers unfolded before me, I found myself wishing I was having more fun. And it’s nothing if not the right kind of film to program midfestival, when those of us who have been watching up to half a dozen films per day on limited sleep and a diet of wine and pastry are starting to get a little bleary-eyed. As with the patchwork faux Europeanism of “The Grand Budapest Hotel” or, more controversially, the miniaturized Japanophilia of his last feature, “Isle of Dogs,” Anderson practically specializes in attractive, magpie-spirited fakery. Set in the fictional French town of (wait for it) Ennui-sur-Blasé, populated mostly by English-speaking Hollywood faces, and dressed entirely according to Anderson’s signature American-preppy principles - perhaps accessorized with a beret here and there - it’s a fantasy of Gallic elegance, eccentricity and ooh-la-la to make “Amelie” look like “La Haine.” theaters in October.)Īs you might just glean from the title, it’s a film about France for viewers not overly attached to authentic standards of Frenchness and thus - or so my friend would say - the optimal film for the festival’s balmy coastal melting pot. (Initially scheduled for release last summer from Searchlight, the film will now hit U.S. Cannes may or may not be France, but I’m always happy to be there regardless, and the rosé - so long as you steer clear of anything pinker than a bad sunburn - tastes just fine to me.īut I did think of his little tirade only a few minutes into “The French Dispatch,” the (very) long-awaited new divertissement from Wes Anderson, which premiered in competition at Cannes tonight, a little past the halfway mark of the festival. ![]() It’s like Disneyland Paris with better clothes.” He wrinkled his nose to underscore his distaste, before dealing the most damning of killer blows. “They put on a big show of being French and purist about it, but the whole thing is defined by the people who go there. “Cannes isn’t France,” a French friend once told me in a brisk tone of airy disdain that was, in notable contrast, the very essence of France itself.
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