Thoughts on The French Dispatch

 I saw an infuriating tweet last week that I can't find anymore, which said (and I'm obviously paraphrasing, since I can no longer find this tweet): "Hating on Wes Anderson is completely over. If you hate Wes Anderson, good news: you won. Every American film now looks exactly the same."

It's a worthy sentiment in defence of a fine cinema stylist - but bogus, since it wasn't Anderson-haters who won the battle for cinema, but Anderson-ignorers; everybody else lost. That we now find ourselves in a landscape where many films are visually monotonous is attributable mostly to the Disney monopoly and in part to the rise of Netflix, which has contributed to squeezing out a good few auteurs, and creating a recognisable 'film-as-content' aesthetic, where photography, decoration, blocking, design don't detract from an easily managed storyline that you can half-watch while texting. 

But this perception of Anderson as representing the last stand of a certain type of cinema, embodied by the French new wave (particularly Truffaut and Jacques Demy) and New Hollywood (from Hal Ashby to Mike Nichols) is prevalent and deeply held. Anderson is an auteur who writes all his own films, which are mostly original stories; who has a recognisable aesthetic based on symmetry, stylised sets and gestures, tidy costumes, etc; and possesses a growing troupe of actors who flit about from one project to the next, from Owen Wilson to Adrien Brody via Willem Dafoe et al. 

It is these traits which, in my view, make Anderson not so much a rejoinder to the current 'IP-as-cinema' ethos, but a corollary of it: in other words, The French Dispatch slots tidily into the extended WCU (Wes Cinematic Universe). If Anderson still has his legions of devoted fans, it is partly because the same tropes and tricks, the bells and whistles of old - as with Marvel - are guaranteed to return from one film to the next, requiring no particular effort of immersion on the viewer's part, and playing a substantial role in luring them back. Of course, Anderson creates original characters from one film to the next, which theoretically distinguishes his work from Marvel: the secret to Disney's success has been in creating franchises where exposition and character-building are unnecessary, so that spectators can indulge in pure story. A substantial upside to this, for Disney, is that viewers may have had their ability to understand and process novelty eroded: this means that competitors now spend their time desperately searching for unused IP to exploit, rather than investing in original storytelling that will connect with our human desire for narratives. 

Wes Anderson doesn't have the same specific characters returning from one film to the other, but he has the next best thing, namely a series of types with bare-bones traits, whose characterisation rests more on their visual aspect (from slapstick to costumes to mannerism to make-up) than on a more deeply-set psychological investment. It seems to this writer that Wes-heads return for these 'sorts' as much as anything - a stuffy Tilda; a shuffling Murray; a goofy Owen Wilson - making his work more accessible, more easily approached. In other words, Anderson's work now functions by accretion, drawing on his filmography to date and playing to the gallery. 

There can be no question that Anderson is an artist - albeit one who is not to my taste, and whose recent work I find increasingly soulless and unrewarding - but indubitably he is able to flourish as an artist in this hostile world for cinema because he represents a particularly strong brand, one against which money for new projects can be stumped up, and which pretty much markets itself. 

The French Dispatch, his latest film, accentuates all of Anderson's particularities to a degree that is suffocating: bizarrely, with increasing freedom as a creator, Anderson has almost folded in on himself rather than opening out, creating an incredibly tightly controlled work, a sort of artisan jigsaw puzzle, which almost parodies his excesses as a filmmaker. Here is Timothee Chalamet with wild eyes, bed-hair and a pencil moustache; here are Demy-style film sets painted in pert pastels; here are puns, arch references, witty names and rococo verbiage; tweed suits and elegant typefaces; a yellow cup!; a face intruding into a neat shot at a sharp angle to evoke comic-book quizzicality. Behold the clockwork comedy of an exactly executed Tati routine! It may very well be that for his admirers, there is a certain giddiness in seeing him work away so brazenly at his own quiddity, but these trademarks taken as a whole feel like vanity, particularly when in service to a story so thin that you are hereby defied - defied! -  to remember the final act by this time next year. 

These quirks of Anderson's have always riled his detractors - me included - but in the past he has at least chipped away at a recognisable sort of humanity. Where are the longing and the melancholy, the jealousy or rage, the sickening weltschmerz or amour fou of yore, in this pop-up book of a film? It's impossible to feel anything in front of this confection, because Anderson's tyranny of style is now so all-destroying that it has killed off any last scintilla of humanity, replacing people with figurines, and the world with coffee-table-book backdrops. Proof of this is when The French Dispatch switches to animation, with no particular change in mode from 3D people to 2D. 

Or take Anderson setting his film in a fictional French city (the cringingly named Ennui-sur-Blasé) based on Paris, at a fictional magazine based on the New Yorker, with fictional characters based on James Baldwin and Mavis Gallant: these are not impish in-jokes designed to appeal to fans who get the references, but another symptom of a now truly despotic filmmaker who has to bend the actual world to his own will. Of course, Anderson is not alone in being so singleminded, nor in becoming more so over the course of his career - famously, Jacques Tati built a whole city in which to stage and shoot his monstrously ambitious film Playtime. But Playtime exists as a far more sui generis film, whose very action, whose aesthetic is constrained by the movie's parameters. Anderson is grabbing, filching from the world we recognise, but passing this stuff off as his own, putting his megalomaniacal stamp on everything that passes before him. This has the effect of making The French Dispatch feel airless and unyielding: the critic Éric Vernay called it a "snow globe", in a turn of phrase that perfectly renders what an object this is, how shorn of freedom and life-force. 

Anderson has now spent several years travelling around the world and pilfering from various cultures, always enacting them in a high-flown, mock-caricatural style that plays up cultural eccentricity, class awareness and stereotypes relating to national identity. From The Darjeeling Limited (India) to The Grand Budapest Hotel (central Europe) to Isle of Dogs (Japan) and now The French Dispatch (France), Anderson has gleefully recuperated and appropriated different cultures, always staying on a surface level of interaction with any particular community, a moustache-twirling approximation of their too unpolished reality. Even his adaptation of Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr Fox - please, please, never make the mistake of showing it to actual children! - exports Dahl's properly English story into Wes Anderson territory, removing its underdog brutality in favour of Anderson's own cod-genteel American upper-class smuggery, laced with quirky visual finds. Anderson now muddies the waters of his own identity as an American, by magpie-ing his way around the world, presenting himself as a kind of borderless aesthete, a Henry James of cinema: this feels quite mendacious to me, and possibly cynical. What does Anderson tell us of himself, of his politics and his heart, of his home, in his cinema? The French Dispatch features only little jokes - like his childish visual gags downplaying the importance of the May 68 social revolution - and no dirt, no heart, no guts.