The French Dispatch 10 Wes Anderson Trademarks In The Movie
The French Dispatch: 10 Wes Anderson Trademarks In The Movie
The French Dispatch has been described as the most Andersonian Wes Anderson movie to date. It certainly has all the hallmarks of his filmmaking.
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While Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch has received mixed reviews from critics, it’s been described as the director’s most Andersonian movie to date. All the quirky hallmarks that Anderson’s fans have come to expect from his filmmaking are prominently displayed in his latest opus.
From the recurring stable of actors including Bill Murray and Owen Wilson to the carefully staged in-camera editing that popped up in Anderson’s movies after he crossed over into animation, The French Dispatch has all the classic signifiers of a Wes Anderson film.
10 Meticulous In-Camera Editing
After making his animation debut with Fantastic Mr. Fox, Anderson transferred some of his newfound filmmaking techniques into live-action. Now, he treats actors like stop-motion figures with their comic timing determined by whip pans.
He has also replaced traditional cuts with meticulous in-camera editing, panning seamlessly from one carefully constructed frame to another in a series of painstakingly orchestrated tracking shots. The French Dispatch has these kinds of shots in spades.
9 Recurring Actors
Like many auteurs, Anderson has built up a company of recurring actors who often appear in his films. The cast of The French Dispatch contains a ton of Anderson regulars: Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Tilda Swinton, Willem Dafoe, Adrien Brody, Saoirse Ronan, Jason Schwartzman, Frances McDormand – the list goes on.
The cast also includes a handful of revered performers who have never appeared in an Anderson movie before, like Timothée Chalamet, Jeffrey Wright, and Elisabeth Moss.
8 Deadpan Humor
Anderson’s French Dispatch script is filled with his signature deadpan humor. For example, when Julien Cadazio tries to buy Moses Rosenthaler’s painting and the imprisoned artist tells him, “It’s not for sale,” they get into a hysterically deadpan back-and-forth: “Yes, it is.” “No, it isn’t.” “Yes, it is.” “No, it isn’t.” “Yes, it is.”
The dry comedic sensibility of Anderson’s works is what makes Bill Murray such a perfect fit for his cinematic universe. Murray’s most memorable deadpan delivery in The French Dispatch is when he fires a young employee who starts to cry and tells him, “Don’t cry in my office,” before Anderson pans up to the “No Crying” sign above the door.
7 Literary Structure
While Anderson is a distinctly visual filmmaker, his movies tend to be structured like literary works. He often splits his movies into chapters. The Royal Tenenbaums is presented as a literal novel, complete with a prologue and an epilogue.
In keeping with this recurring style, The French Dispatch is presented as the final issue of the titular magazine. Every time Anderson introduces a new story, he tells the audience how many pages it takes up in the magazine to prepare them for roughly how long that section of the film will be.
6 Grief
The story of Anderson’s latest movie is built around the obituary of French Dispatch editor Arthur Howitzer, Jr. after he dies suddenly of a heart attack. This fits in neatly with the recurring theme of grief in Anderson’s movies.
In Rushmore, Max Fischer and Miss Cross bond over the loss of their mother and husband, respectively. In The Royal Tenenbaums, the sudden passing of Chas’ wife has made him overly protective and safety-conscious. In The Darjeeling Limited, the Whitman brothers reunite a year after their father’s funeral to clear the air.
5 Changing Aspect Ratios
This is a relatively new stylistic hallmark of Anderson’s filmmaking. He used three different aspect ratios to signify the three different time periods in The Grand Budapest Hotel. In the 1980s, as a reader enjoys the writer’s novel, Anderson shoots in standard 1.85:1. In the 1960s, as an older Zero recounts the story to the young writer, Anderson shoots in glorious widescreen 2.35:1. And in the 1930s, charting the central story – the majority of the movie – Anderson shoots in Academy ratio (1.37:1).
Anderson transferred this visual flourish over to The French Dispatch. In his new movie, he also switches between color and black-and-white a few times (something he only did for one scene in Grand Budapest).
4 Precocious Children
From Rushmore’s 15-year-old playwright Max Fischer to Moonrise Kingdom’s wise-beyond-their-years lovers-on-the-run Sam and Suzy to the prodigious trio of Tenenbaum children, Anderson’s movies are filled with precocious children.
He usually comedically contrasts the mature, intelligent child characters with immature, unintelligent adult characters. In The French Dispatch, a kidnapped boy uses Morse code to save himself.
3 Art Nouveau Color Palette
There are long stretches of black-and-white in The French Dispatch, but the color sequences bear Anderson’s unmistakable Art Nouveau palette.
The hard-to-define but easy-to-spot Art Nouveau style is defined by muted but vibrant colors like greens, lilacs, and soft blues. The French Dispatch primarily conveys these colors through the signature Andersonian costume design.
2 Sprawling Ensemble Cast
Although Anderson’s first and second films focused on just three main characters each, every Anderson movie from The Royal Tenenbaums onward has featured a huge, sprawling ensemble cast – sometimes with A-listers in minor roles and relative unknowns in major roles.
After rounding out the star-studded staff of the titular magazine, each of the three stories presented from the final issue of The French Dispatch has a giant ensemble of its own.
1 Symmetrical Compositions
Symmetrical compositions are one of the most recognizable tropes of Anderson’s visual style. The director’s use of “planimetric staging” – a fancy term for placing the camera at a 90-degree angle from the subject – started with the quirky visuals of The Royal Tenenbaums.
Anderson’s first two movies, Bottle Rocket and Rushmore, have much more naturalistic cinematography by comparison. Planimetric staging was also used by Jean-Luc Godard, Stanley Kubrick, and Yasujirō Ozu, but not to nearly the same extent as Anderson, who has composed almost all of his post-Tenenbaums shots like this.
Link Source : https://screenrant.com/french-dispatch-wes-anderson-trademarks/
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