If there is a jauntier film this year than THE FRENCH DISPATCH I want to know about it.
This jubilant and lambent anthology about ex pat Yanks based in Ennui-sur-Blasé writing for the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun is, quite simply and delightfully, a joi de vie jamboree, a satirical savoir faire, a coup de grace of farce and slapstick and erudite eloquence.
Director Wes Anderson wields his words and vaunts his visuals with a flamboyant exuberance that suggests Ludwig of Bavaria let loose in a movie studio.
Half the cast of the current James Bond crowd pleaser, No Time To Die, is here – Lea Seydoux, Jeffrey Wright and Christoph Waltz. Bond villains of yore Mathieu Amalric and Benicio Del Toro too.
Academy Award winners Adrien Brody, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton and Anjelica Huston are along for the ride. And Willem Dafoe, Saoirse Ronan, Bill Murray, Owen Wilson and Henry Winkler.
Director Wes Anderson has been nominated in the past for Academy Awards for both Best Picture and Best Animated Film and in THE FRENCH DISPATCH he melds both. Mainly live action, the film has a brilliant animated section, and the film overall plays with perspective, colour and black and white.
Anderson and his story collaborators Roman Coppola, Hugo Guiness and Jason Schwatzman have calibrated a celebratory ode to the magazine editors and journalists of the golden age of The New Yorker and The Paris Review.
It is absurd, riotous, and never less than entertaining to ear and eye.
Adam Stockhausen Academy Award winning production designer on The Grand Budapest Hotel fills every frame with gorgeous detail from streetscapes, dining rooms, prison cells and, off course, magazine offices, all magnificently captured by cinematographer Robert D. Yeoman in trade mark rectilinear camera moves and stunning tableau.
Four time Oscar winner, Milena Canonero affords the film with a sumptuous array of costumes and the icing on the cake with a cherry on top is the whimsical score by Alexandre Desplat.
Eclectic, eccentric, electrifying, intelligent and contagiously entertaining, THE FRENCH DISPATCH is a mad, mad, mad, mad whirl that demands to be seen more than once for more reasons than few.
