There’s a quiet, ever-lurking feeling that’s been sitting in the back of my mind for months, taunting me from a distance. It’s persistent in nagging away at my brain in silent moments when I’m alone. I think it’s a feeling we all experience at one point or another in this life and it’s this: knowing the vastness of our own experiences, emotions, and thoughts, is it ever possible to truly know someone? Or will we spend our years grasping at memories shared with the ones we love, wondering if it’s enough? Seeking to know someone is as intertwined with living as breathing, and it’s the central theme throughout Wes Anderson’s “The French Dispatch.”
In a very crude sense, a person can be defined as a collection of stories, some more interesting than others. Released in 2020, “The French Dispatch” is about stories and what makes a person’s story worth telling. Structured as an anthology, the film is a love letter to journalists, bringing to life a collection of stories written for a magazine called, of course, The French Dispatch. A deranged artist falls in love with his prison guard, a young, rowdy revolutionary struggles to etch out his destiny, and a prison chef’s unique cuisine ends a hostage crisis.
Feature writing, a distinct art within journalism, is used as Anderson’s canvas to develop his stories, with each story narrated by its writer in the film. It’s a subtle yet important evolution for Anderson’s writing, allowing him to not only write distinct dialogue but also unique prose in the voice of each of his narrators.
J.K.L. Bernstein (Tilda Swinton) is our first writer, a haughty but sharp art critic who reflects on her brief encounter with the now-infamous painter Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio Del Toro) in “The Concrete Masterpiece.” Weaving together his biography and artistic development, Bernstein reinforces a seemingly familiar tale of a tortured master. She pushes beyond that idea, though, to a far more compelling part of her subject’s life: that Rosenthaler is madly in love with his prison guard. His abstract masterpieces now become windows into the soul of a love-sick man, connecting us to a person who was seemingly unknowable.
Anderson is plucking away at the idea of “knowing” throughout each story. Rosenthaler’s experience is radically different than most, but by the conclusion of “The Concrete Masterpiece,” we feel how he feels. Bernstein’s feature is beautiful in that it describes the work of an artist while capturing the universal feeling of love and yearning which we all understand intuitively. Universality remains a persistent theme throughout the next two stories.
Mad artists give way to mad students as Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand) writes “Revisions of a Manifesto,” the second story, which revolves around Zeffirelli (Timothee Chalamet), the leader of a student protest in France. Revolutionaries and their manifestos are satirized as Zeffierlli comedically exposes to Krementz his childish nature. She writes: “He is not an invincible comet, speeding on its guided arc toward the outer reaches of the galaxy in cosmic space-time. Rather, he is a boy who will die young.” A revolutionary who will be worn on t-shirts and come to define an era is just a boy, aching with his own growing pains.
We know the boy for the same reason we know the artist, but here Anderson reaches a grander idea too: how we iconize or “know” people without actually understanding them. We wear them on t-shirts and quote their manifestos all without comprehending who they are to any real degree. There’s no grace for the boy we think we know.
Police cooking, a seemingly made-up profession, is the topic of the third feature: “The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner.” Its author, Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright), weaves together a lustrous thread. He begins by detailing the deliciously complex meals prepared by police chef Nescaffier (Steve Park) and ending with Nescaffier’s daring rescue of a boy by feeding his kidnappers poison radishes (which he also consumes and barely survives).
What matters is not the police chef’s cooking, nor his ensuing bravery, but a private moment shared by Wright and Nescaffier at the end of it all. Nescaffier cries tears of joy at discovering a new flavor within the poison radish, tenderly showing Wright his pure love for his work. Furthermore, it’s revealed that the two are both immigrants and that Nescaffier wasn’t brave at all, but simply not willing to disappoint anyone.
“Maybe with good luck we’ll find what eluded us in the places we once called home,” whispers Wright. That simple line brings me to tears even as a write this. Anderson cuts right to the heart of these two men, allowing them to know each other despite their brief encounter.
In the end, it is not the vast expanses of memory that lead us to a true understanding of our fellow man, but rather the fleeting moments that shoot out to us, begging to be grabbed. In this sense, “The French Dispatch” transcends the confines of a magazine to reflect a human truth: that stories are nothing without the small gestures made by the people within them. Touching the face of a lover, the rush of youth and the sensation of a new flavor.
