Wes Anderson hasn’t made a live-action film since 2014’s sumptuous and melancholy The Grand Budapest Hotel. So his return to the form that made him an internationally beloved filmmaker after six years is both welcome and intriguing.
Nothing against his last movie, the stop-motion animated Isle of Dogs, but everything teased so far about The French Dispatch suggests a thematically richer experience.
The French Dispatch was filmed between November 2018 and March 2019 in Angoulême, a small city located in the southwest of France, and it’s set to be one of the first releases under Fox Searchlight’s new post-Disney moniker, Searchlight Pictures.
Check out the first trailer for The French Dispatch below…
The French Dispatch boasts an impressively starry cast, filled almost entirely with Anderson alumni. Among the troupe stalwarts appearing in major roles are Tilda Swinton, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Adrien Brody, Owen Wilson, Léa Seydoux, Willem Dafoe, Saoirse Ronan, Edward Norton and Tony Revelori. Among the newcomers are Timothée Chalamet, Jeffrey Wright, Benicio Del Toro, Mathieu Amalric, Elisabeth Moss and Christoph Waltz.
Clearly intended to be a tribute to journalists during precarious times in our world, the film is expected to be something of an anthology that follows interwoven stories chronicled in The French Dispatch, a fictional American newspaper located in the southwest of France. Set circa World War II, it apparently draws inspiration from The New Yorker and likely the type of post-war movies about mid-20th century muckrakers. The official logline is:
“A love letter to journalists set in an outpost of an American newspaper in a fictional 20th-century French city that brings to life a collection of stories published in The French Dispatch magazine.”
This is an intriguing setting, since The Grand Budapest Hotel was set in a fictional hotel in a fictional nation, but clearly dealt with the horrors of fascism rising in the kind of gilded society that Anderson movies previously treated as harmless. Yet that 2014 film depicted a certain bitterness about how it all went away during the Second World War, so one wonders if this will thematically continue those thoughts.
The French Dispatch will hit UK cinemas on 28 August 2020 (a month after the US release on 24 July). In the meantime, take a peek at the rather gorgeous-looking teaser poster…
