The master of ultra-ironic hipster filmmaking, Wes Anderson doubles down on his one-of-a-kind style with the release this week of "The French Dispatch", an ode to journalists and his adopted country
The Texan director's latest film crams in some major star power, with Timothee Chalamet and Benicio del Toro joining Anderson regulars such as Owen Wilson, Tilda Swinton and, of course, Bill Murray.
Based around a group of US magazine writers in the fictional French town of Ennui-sur-Blase, it takes the unique style he has built through films like The Grand Budapest Hotel, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and The Royal Tenenbaums to even more surreal limits.
Anderson, who has lived in France for many years, filmed his latest movie in the southern city of Angouleme before the coronavirus pandemic, which delayed its release by more than a year.
It is finally hitting cinemas in the US and most European territories over the next week.
"When I think of the countries that mean the most to me, it's France that I think of first," Anderson told AFP at the Cannes Film Festival in July, where the film got its world premiere.
"It's French cinema that was part of what made me want to make movies."
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As always, his film is full of obsessively composed imagery, deadpan humour and knowing references—but this time taken to extremes. "The scale of the film is bigger than anything I've done before and I didn't really know that until I started," the 52-year-old director said.
It also has an amusing mix of languages. "The American actors speak English and the French speak French, which happens to me in life all the time," Anderson said. "I don't know if anyone has done it quite that way in a movie before. I wasn't sure this is even going to work but no one has said that it's confusing. . . yet."
He pushed back against the idea that his films are deliberately quirky. "Really, even if my films seem sometimes byzantine and complex, all I want to do is to conventionally tell a story. I have my characters and I want to make a world for them."
But he added with a smile: "There are ways I go about doing it that I don't necessarily control."
