Critics reviews

With its excesses of whimsy and affectation, Dispatch has been criticised as a self-parodic retreat into Anderson’s signature aesthetic... The French Dispatch is a restorative fantasy for a generation of journalists who have seen their trade disparaged while the lineage rates diminish.

To use a literary term from the culture that the movie venerates, The French Dispatch is an example of mise en abyme, a self-reflexive work of art that contains its own reproduction in miniature. Just like the endlessly fussed-over magazine of the title, this endlessly fussed-over movie showcases a deliberately comic disproportion between effort expended and results achieved.

The French Dispatch is Anderson’s most impressionistic and unusual film, not to mention his most ambitious. The sprawling cast list might have once looked intimidating, but they flit in and out of frame, adding colour and life to the headlines.

What’s so unfortunate about The French Dispatch is how the multitude of distinct authorial styles, themes, subjects, and settings at its source yield and flatten under the weight of Anderson’s propeller-beanie twee, politic, and wit. Lost in the process is the genuine spirit of The New Yorker, at once easy to parody or pastiche, yet hard to nail without versatility and depth beyond the boundaries of Anderson’s toy workshop.

Anderson currently resides in Paris, and this ardent Francophile takes much influence here from directors like Jaques Tati, Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Demy. But he also draws inspiration from the sartorial aloofness of 20th-century Parisian fashion, yé-yé pop music, and the ligne claire aesthetic of Hergé’s The Adventures of Tintin. The result feels like stepping into a fanciful time machine and arriving in a version of post-war Europe that has only ever existed on the Big Screen.

By Anderson’s own standards, The French Dispatch is below par. Yet compared to the average film, it’s a winner. What’s not to like about a tender ode to crumpled writers? What’s not to love about zingers so zesty they’d surely make the ghosts of Harold Ross and William Shawn smile?

Although visual impact is par for the course with Anderson, this might be his most superbly realised film yet, with the quartet of scenarios allowing him to innovate across a broad spectrum. However, the usual problems with portmanteau films do arise; it's not as immersive as watching one single story, so it's harder to get lost in it, and some vignettes are simply more interesting than others – 'The Concrete Masterpiece' being a particular highlight.

There is as much thought that goes into the story as does its set. There is almost a whimsical nature it creates, welcoming audiences to the experience of the film, never telling them what to feel but rather letting their acted features speak to you.

Frequently rebuked by naysayers for his commitment to his finely-tuned, “quirky” filmmaking style, The French Dispatch proves he is more interested than anything in how to play around with the medium of film and find new ways to tell his stories. Here, he challenges himself to a far more intricate means of storytelling, which is occasionally convoluted but fosters an eagerness to return to the film—to revisit and discover something new.

So much of Anderson’s work is concerned with nostalgia and the grandeur of lost worlds. The French Dispatch is of a piece with that tendency, especially his 2014 film The Grand Budapest Hotel. Once it was enough for him to make movies in real locations, but Hotel’s Zubrowka and Ennui-sur-Blasé are pure confections. Despite the whimsy, there is a deep longing in this tendency to conjure great castles in the sky.

he French Dispatch is a palimpsest of Andersonian obsessions: the off-kilter love affairs, the eccentric cads, the other-worldly innocence, the odd phrasing, the cafe orchestra music, the colouring book palette, the technical drawing framing, the occasional slapstick and an obsessional devotion to the New Yorker. So intricately detailed, the film demands a rewatch almost immediately.

Anderson’s attention to detail is as mind-blowing as ever, with each scene appearing like a painting thanks to impressive staging, costumes, and set design. There is always something on screen to admire and everything comes together like clockwork. There’s even a fully animated scene during a point of intense action which is delightfully surprising and added the final touch this film needed.