Director

Wes Anderson

United Kingdom, France, Germany | 2021 | 107 min | English

• Producer Wes Anderson, Steven Rales, Jeremy Dawson
• Production Company Indian Paintbrush, American Empirical Pictures
• Screenplay Wes Anderson
• Cinematography Robert Yeoman
• Editing Andrew Weisblum
• Sound
• Cast Benicio Del Toro, Frances McDormand , Jeffrey Wright, Adrien Brody, Tilda Swinton
• Contacts

  SearchLight Pictures
  

  www.foxsearchlight.com

  Middle East Distributor

  Italia films

  carlo@g-vincenti.com.lb

About the Film

In his latest oeuvre, Wes Anderson offers a cinematic love letter to journalists, a kind of tribute to The New Yorker magazine, which entertained the filmmaker in his youth and has inspired his work as an adult. In typical Anderson style, The French Dispatch features a stellar cast of actors, many of whom are his frequent collaborators.

Set in the fictional French city of Ennui-sur-Blasé, a cross between Paris and Angoulême, a small town stuck in an era gone by where the film was shot, it weaves the stories from a fictional American newspaper’s French outpost. Featuring, in a very tongue in cheek manner: “an obituary, a travel guide and three articles". As this is after all a Wes Anderson film, most of the characters are inspired by real life literary heroes. Men like The New Yorker co-founder and editor-in-chief Harold Ross, who in the film is named Arthur Howitzer Jr. and is played by the inimitable Bill Murray, but also writer Joseph Mitchell, AKA Owen Wilson's Herbsaint Sazerac, whose prolific work helped to establish The New Yorker, but who struggled with mental health issues in his later life.

What the audience ends up watching on the big screen is a fantastically beautiful rendition of what reading the famous magazine must have felt like to a young boy growing up in Texas. And we all know who that young boy grew up to be, a groundbreaking cinematic auteur who now calls Paris his home.

Filled with Anderson’s usual aesthetic flair and overflowing with literary references — as well as inside jokes related to the culture scenes of the 1950s and ’60s in New York and Paris — The French Dispatch is a delicious guilty pleasure to behold, one that can delight Anderson's devotees but also inspire a whole new generation of fans, due to the presence of idol of the moment Timothée Chalamet and Algerian star to watch Lyna Khoudri.

E. Nina Rothe