The French Dispatch

Let me start off by saying that I am a big Wes Anderson fan and I got the chance to analyze some of his movies for university and therefor got to analyze why I liked his film so much and why they felt like home. But The French Dispatch didn’t feel anything like home and here are the reasons why I believe it left me with a hole in my heart.

The French Dispatch is one of Anderson’s most ambitious films design wise. We go through several different stories, sets and decors while he maintains his visual style to the T. The camera movements are what to expect from Anderson but since The Isle Of Dogs‘ Dutch angle, I was hoping to see something new and adventurous and he did not disappoint. I was very surprised and still intrigued about the use of handheld shots during a confrontation scene. It felt chaotic amidst all the control and meticulousness throughout the rest of the film but it was a breath of fresh air or like a hidden Easter egg. I am not quite sure of its use but I cannot stop thinking about it.

But unlike it, there was a scene that stood out like a sore thumb. The animated car chase. I do not understand Anderson’s choice behind it and it is giving me a headache for days. It does not even fit his animation style and feels very cheap like he did not have enough time to shoot it and opted for this as a solution. I love his fight/action scenes but this one left me disappointed.

I think this film should have been made as a limited series with long episodes for each part. Because of how it was built, it lost the most important element of Anderson’s films in my opinion, and the reason why I loved them so much, the concept of the collective. It is in all his films, the main character/characters build their own families that they belong with/to and that makes the viewer feel a part of it. The film was very theatrical and reminded me of Rushmore in that sense but it seemed like we did not have enough time to really meet the characters in the stories, the journalists writing them or even the editor in chief who should have been the glue to keep it all together. Imagine if any other main Anderson character died, how would you feel about it? Sad? Angry? Definitely. But this was not the case in The French Dispatch. We did not really know the character enough to mourn his loss and he felt overall like a means to a way and that is it.