The history in this segment is an uncanny blend between French flourishes and American atrocities, like one darkly humorous use of an electric chair, a device that has never been used in French prisons but remains an option in the United States. For some of these, Anderson and his long-time cinematographer Robert Yeoman leave behind their careful symmetry in favor of a more loose and hand-held camera (which, at one point, they even tether to a speeding wheelchair), but in other cases, the filmmakers lean into their established aesthetic to the point of delightful self-parody, making the actors hold still as the camera dollies sideways between enormous tableaus, each depicting snapshots of mayhem that blur the lines between “civil” society and the world behind prison walls. Behrman, but the story is also wildly original, both in its bleakly funny conception of artistic inspiration and self-loathing, and its frenzied depiction of comedic action scenes. Cadazio is based on the real-life dealer Lord Duveen, and Anderson appears to take cues from the New Yorker’s six-part profile on him by S. Berensen (Tilda Swinton) as she tells the story of long-incarcerated abstract artist Moses Rosenthaler (Tony Revolori/Benicio del Toro), as well as Rosenthaler’s muse and prison guard Simone (Léa Seydoux) and the wild-eyed art dealer Julien Cadazio (Adrien Brody), who tries to manipulate the genius painter into creating more masterworks for him to sell. This brief travelogue is followed by the first main segment, titled “The Concrete Masterpiece,” which features the recollections of art critic J.K.L. It’s art as memory, an idea the film eventually embodies. Within each flashback, brief bursts of color envelop the screen, usually when a character lays eyes on a memorable piece of art, or something moving or alluring, as if these fleeting moments and sensations from long ago have lingered with them in the present. This simple, recognizable visual language continues throughout the film, with each section featuring a framing device in color before its main story unfolds in black-and-white flashbacks - with a few key exceptions. Sazerac’s tour of the city - a seeming dramatization of a fantasy article he wrote - involves a split-screen contrast between black and white images of Ennui’s past and contemporary color photographs. as a contrasting voice of reason and authority, reining in the fussy (though self-aware) cynicism Anderson ascribes to Sazerac, as if the editor were correcting a teenage Anderson’s misconceptions about the true nature of Mitchell’s work. The first is how it uses Bill Murray’s Howitzer Jr. This story sets the stage for the rest of the film in two key ways. Sazerac is based on New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell, best known for his focus on the grimier, more disreputable elements of NYC, and Anderson’s framing of the character and his writing appears to harken back to (and in some ways, critique) a mal-formed perspective on the touching and distinctly human reality Mitchell brought to the page. It feels like a disaffected teenager’s idea of French artistry (the town’s name means “tedium,” and it’s located on the river “indifference”), but the film is anything but nihilistic or emotionally distant, despite this tongue-in-cheek introduction. His paper was dedicated to bringing France and French culture to Kansas, the kind of global window you might picture a young Anderson fervently gazing through, via the magazine articles that informed his four subsequent stories.Īnother short prologue follows travel writer Herbsaint Sazerac (Owen Wilson) as he gives us a tour of the lively-but-macabre nooks and crannies of the wryly named town of Ennui-sur-Blasé. Howitzer Jr., based in part on New Yorker co-founder Harold Ross, was a stern man of few words - as the film goes on to show, since the obituary segment is used to frame the rest of the story in flashbacks - but Anderson depicts him with reverence, and with a solemn respect for a dying art. (Bill Murray), and for the paper he founded 50 years prior, the French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun. The story begins with a 1975 obituary, both for editor Arthur Howitzer Jr. In The French Dispatch, that history is an imaginary blend between America and France, the former being the place Anderson is from, and the latter a place you could easily imagine he wishes he were from (if his French New Wave-inspired early works are anything to go by).
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