#ronan however is completely oblivious to this similarity

[eternalchemy]

adam making up a version of himself thats successful in regular traditional society and desperately trying to distance himself from magic and art and ending up a liar and realising he cant escape it and trying just makes him miserable even tho he thought it would keep him safe. oh did i say adam? i couldve sworn that was declan

[adamrevi3ws]

The French Dispatch

Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch surprisingly has a lot in common with Dune. They were released on the same day, they boast some of the most stacked casts in years (including a prominent Timothee Chalamet role in each), and they are, quite frankly, a whole lot of sensory overload. Finally, and most importantly, I consider both to be some of my favorite films of the year.

The main reason why I like it is that Anderson goes all the way in with his style and, idk, Wes Anderson-ian proclivities. Not only does it have his standard “dollhouse” aesthetic and strong animation influences, but added to that are an overwhelmingly large amount of framing devices. The French Dispatch is ostensibly a tribute to The New Yorker, and reflects this in visuals, plot, and structure. Centered around a magazine in the 1950s-70s detailing the goings-on of a town in France, the film presents itself as an issue of the magazine, with three independent “features” telling a story of their own. That’s just one of many ways Anderson decides to tell his stories, for absolutely no reason. Sometimes the film is a magazine, sometimes it’s a play, sometimes it’s a televised interview, and sometimes it’s even an animated cartoon, and I completely dig it! Things like this are what make it Dune-levels of sensory overload, where there’s simply too many details crammed into 103 minutes of screentime. The writing even follows the New Yorker theme, being so detailed and pretentious that it makes the film even harder to follow. The combination of its dense directing choices and writing might be a turn-off to some, but I believe the film still pulls it off, following its iconic quote of “Just Try To Make It Sound Like You Wrote It That Way On Purpose.” Despite all this conceptual and stylistic heavy-handedness, color, one of Wes Anderson’s strongest tools isn’t really present. 80% of the film is shot in black and white, but Anderson’s directing is so strong that its absence is barely noted. If anything, the camerawork, set design, and acting add more “color” than the few random cuts where it is present. At the end of the day, The French Dispatch is quite similar to Annette, another one of my favorite movies of the year, where there were so many times where I just had to go “damn… the director really did that?” and it’s amazing.

Like another director with the last name Anderson (hint: he directed The Master), Wes Anderson is a maestro at bringing out fantastic performances from the actors he works with. As I’ve mentioned before, the cast is absurdly stacked, to the point that a LOT of big names are stealthily squeezed in with few to no lines of dialogue. For what it’s worth, I didn’t even notice Oscar regulars like Christoph Walz and Saoirse Ronan making appearances until my dad and sister pointed it out. Cameos aside, the actors that Anderson centers in each segment of the film are what really drive it forward in his wonderful and unique stew of quirks and details. Benicio Del Toro and Frances McDormand deliver their best as per usual. Timothy Chalamet and Wes Anderson are an actor-director match made in heaven, particularly because of Anderson’s fantastic comedic command of youthful awkwardness, giving Timmy much more material to work with than he had in Dune. However, the true star of the show is Jeffery Wright, arguably giving a career best performance. Portraying a stand-in for James Baldwin and a prolific New Yorker food critic, Wright embodies a perfect combination of genius and obliviousness and delivers a once-in-a-lifetime monologue that opens a lot of doors to the true theme of this film. That monologue, in my opinion, is what really elevated The French Dispatch from Just Another Wes Anderson movie to one of my favorite films of the year and will stay in my head for every rewatch.

The French Dispatch is one of the greatest testaments to how far Wes Anderson can take the medium of film to something so unique, funny, and personal. It is, by far, tied with Pigas my favorite movie of the year (so far!) Ten stars out of ten.