Monthly Archives: December 2021

  • The French Dispatch

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Wes Anderson (2021)

    Set in a fictional French town, the outpost of a fictional American magazine, Wes Anderson’s latest is an anthology piece, dramatising supposed articles from the magazine.  The sequences framing the narrative are based in the offices of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun, which publishes the cultural supplement that gives Anderson’s film its title.  The French Dispatch is summarised on IMDb as a ‘love letter to journalists’ and dedicated, ahead of the closing credits, to a long list of contributors, over the decades, to The New Yorker.  As expected, plenty of press reviewers, suffering from all-publicity-is-good-publicity syndrome, love the film in return.  The fans include both New Yorker film critics (a relief, if not a surprise, that Anthony Lane’s measured praise makes more sense than Richard Brody’s highfalutin hyperbole).  Inert from the start, The French Dispatch soon becomes infuriating.  With nearly every new scene featuring yet another well-known actor wasting their time, it amounts cumulatively to an obscene squandering of talents, including the writer-director’s own.  The project must have required a good deal of research; the result, as usual with Anderson, is a display of fanatically detailed and ingenious design.  Yet his treatment of the human components in that design is neither satirical nor admiring – the tone is mildly nostalgic, tamely joshing and tiresomely jocose.  The film lacks the emotional energy to be a love letter worthy of the name.

    Like The New Yorker, Anderson’s magazine began life in 1925.  To ensure that The French Dispatch is thoroughly and safely reminiscent, he doesn’t allow his magazine the longevity of its inspiration.  The death of its founding and only editor, Arthur Howitzer Jr (Bill Murray), in 1975, is announced at the start of the film (although that’s not the last we see of Howitzer):  his will decrees that, when he ceases to exist, so shall his brainchild.  The dramatised articles number four.  The first is a relatively short travelogue in which a cycling reporter (Owen Wilson) sets the French provincial scene.  The next, enclosed within a lecture by an art historian and critic (Tilda Swinton), tells the story of an artist-murderer (Benicio del Toro) who paints in prison, where his uniformed guard (Léa Seydoux) doubles as his nude model.  The third chapter centres on French student politics in 1968, as represented by a soi-disant revolutionary (Timothée Chalamet) and covered by a sharp-tongued foreign correspondent (Frances McDormand).  In the last section, a distinguished Black author (Jeffrey Wright), who emigrated to France and wrote about its food, recalls the career of a chef of police cuisine (Stephen Park) and how he solved a kidnapping.  Here too the events described are retrospectively contained, in a TV talk show conversation between the writer and an interviewer (Liev Schreiber).   In addition to these framing devices and the sequences in Howitzer’s office, there’s an intermittent voiceover narration (by Anjelica Huston), which doesn’t belong to a character and comes from nowhere in particular.

    The French town is called Ennui-sur-Blasé.  In the gastronomic crime caper, the sleuth chef is Lieutenant Nescaffier.  Those names give a fair idea of how self-congratulatory The French Dispatch is, pleased even with the feebleness of its jokes.  (It’s apt enough, though perhaps not in the way he intends, that Anderson calls a café in the town ‘Le sans blague’.)  An inbuilt advantage of the portmanteau film is that, when it drags, you can rest assured that the next part will be along soon and hope it’ll be better. In The French Dispatch soon is never soon enough and things don’t look up.  Perhaps the three elements that make up most of its running time (103 minutes) are conceived as a tribute to The New Yorker’s celebrated feature-length articles (the student politics episode is clearly indebted to Mavis Gallant’s two-part piece on the May 1968 riots).  But Anderson does a disservice as much as homage to the magazine of Harold Ross and William Shawn, and to some of those who wrote for them.  Anderson’s gay African American in French exile is obviously based on James Baldwin.  It’s insulting to the memory of a fine novelist and passionate commentator on race issues to turn him into a food columnist.  This seems designed as a killing-two-birds-with-one-stone jape, referencing Baldwin at the same time as teasing The New Yorker’s gourmet tendencies – a quality that ties in, of course, with the magazine’s smart metropolitan flavour.  I could make no sense of the film’s premise that a small-town American newspaper would spawn a New Yorker-like offspring in continental Europe (Ennui-sur-Blasé, for the most part, might as well be Paris).  Anderson doesn’t even try to get comic mileage out of the mismatch.

    The actors’ names in brackets above are the tip of an iceberg of famous names.  The cast also features – among many others – Bob Balaban, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Alex Lawther, Elisabeth Moss, Edward Norton, Saoirse Ronan, Jason Schwartzman, Lois Smith and Christoph Waltz.  As well as Léa Seydoux, the relatively small contingent of French (or Belgian) actors includes Mathieu Amalric, Damien Bonnard, Cécile De France and Denis Ménochet.  Since Anderson has several of his non-French actors pretending to be French, the real thing might seem surplus to requirements.  In the event, it doesn’t make much difference because everything French in the film is actually ‘French’ – that is, an educated American’s whimsical view of France and French culture.  Not that the Americans in evidence are any less artificial.  The characters are sketches at best; those playing them have next to nothing with which to work.  The resulting performances aren’t just effortless but weightless.  When, rarely, someone suggests a person you’d be interested to know more about – Frances McDormand, Saoirse Ronan (as a chanteuse kidnapper), Liev Schreiber – it’s a momentary shot in the arm to the film but also a little jarring.  Giving someone more than one dimension feels like an aberration.

    Weightless is also the word for the violence in The French Dispatch.  This merits a BBFC warning and it’s true the body count is quite high but the mayhem isn’t offensive.  Like everything else, it’s too hollow to matter.  There are a couple of animated sequences.  You’re almost grateful for the second one:  by the time it comes along, the film has become so listless that any kind of dynamism on the screen is welcome.  It makes you wonder why Anderson didn’t go the whole hog and make another animated feature; then you remember Isle of Dogs (2018) and think again.  In The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), the title location, in its heyday, has the look of a fancy, multi-layered gateau; the produce of a de luxe patisserie plays a significant part in the plot.  Even so, the characters just about hold their own against Anderson’s various non-human confections.  In The French Dispatch the balance of power has shifted decisively.  The people and ideas matter far less than the decoration.  It says a lot that a performer as naturally witty as Tilda Swinton is upstaged by the false teeth she wears here.  Wes Anderson has become a sort of auteur-patissier, so preoccupied with fancy piping that he’s neglecting to bake a decent cake.     

    1 November 2021

  • The Tree of Wooden Clogs

    Old YorkerFilm review

    L’albero degli zoccoli

    Ermanno Olmi (1978)

    A coincidence:  just before seeing Ermanno Olmi’s film, I’d read a piece by Francis Spufford, in his True Stories collection of articles and lectures, praising the horizons-expanding power of books.  This is a familiar theme within the Spufford corpus (vide The Child That Books Built) but its reiteration is refreshing at a time when cultural fashion insists – more and more insistently – that people need to see themselves ‘represented’ in what they read or watch on screen.  The Tree of Wooden Clogs is set in rural Bergamo, Lombardy, at the very end of the nineteenth century.  Its central characters are four peasant families who scrape a living off the land; the income deriving from their work as tenant farmers is mostly destined for their landlord’s pocket.  The one major episode of the story set in town rather than country follows two members of this group – a young, newly-married couple – to Milan, on a mission to adopt a foundling from a nunnery.  The child will guarantee its adoptive parents a regular income – a kind of family allowance – throughout its early years.  Olmi (1931-2108) was born in Bergamo and grew up in Milan but in social circumstances very different from his characters’.  The lives he describes are even further removed from those of most audiences who’ve seen and will see his film.  That distance is a big part of what makes The Tree of Wooden Clogs so illuminating.

    There are some difficult consequences to entering this world, especially for a viewer coming to the film for the first time (as I was doing) more than forty years after its original release.  Chief among these is the treatment of animals on screen.  The Wikipedia article’s warning of ‘real footage of a goose and pig being killed’ hardly prepares you for it.  The bird’s execution is over quickly; the pig’s isn’t, and its terrified screams are gruelling.  Later on, one of the characters happens to find a gold coin, which he decides to conceal inside his horse’s hoof.  When, unsurprisingly, the coin is dislodged and lost, the man blames the horse by striking it repeatedly.  It’s another suffering animal that brings into sharpest focus a different foreignness – the power of the Catholic faith that sustains the community.  Much of the livestock kept by the tenants belongs to the landowner.  When an exception, a cow owned by one of the families, falls ill, the local vet is called urgently and delivers a cursory, gloomy prognosis.  The materfamilias, after praying in church for the cow’s survival, feeds her holy water.  The animal survives.

    ‘A miracle, my friend, is an event which creates faith.  That is the purpose and nature of miracles.  They may seem very wonderful to the people who witness them, and very simple to those who perform them.  That does not matter: if they confirm or create faith they are true miracles.’

    The cow miracle brings to mind those words, spoken by the Archbishop of Rheims in George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan – except that the woman in Olmi’s film seems to find the answer to her prayers a wonderful and a simple matter.  The religious disposition of The Tree of Wooden Clogs is devout yet unsentimental.  A woman giving birth has the serene expression of a Madonna but the baby is another mouth to feed.  The peasants believe that God will provide but use their own ingenuity to ensure that happens.  The elderly Anselmo grows tomatoes each year to sell to local grocers.  As do others – so Anselmo, assisted by his little granddaughter, decides to plant the seeds earlier than usual to gain a competitive edge.  The plan pays off (though it’s unclear why he’d not thought of it before).

    The Tree of Wooden Clogs covers a year, illustrating the changing seasons and the established annual rhythms of the families’ lives.  Olmi thus returns two or three times to the progress of Anselmo’s tomato crop but another recurring theme – the focal point of early scenes and the root cause of the closing ones – makes for a less happy ending.  The farmer Batisti faces a dilemma.  One of his children is reckoned by the local priest bright enough to attend school – something no other member of the family has hitherto done.  The reassuring priest persuades Batisti that he should allow his son an education.  Each day, the boy completes a long solo walk to and from school.  In winter weather, his footwear disintegrates.  Batisti cuts down an alder tree from which he makes his son a pair of wooden clogs.  When the landowner discovers what has happened, Batisti and his family are evicted.  Their neighbours mourn their departure but not much else will change in the cascina.  New tenants will move in.  Work and rest, birth and death will go on as before.

    In addition to the Milan excursion, there are scenes outside the farm and its environs at locations such as a fair and a public meeting, where a political radical makes a speech.  Although this is given Private Eye contd p 94 treatment, presumably to suggest how little the speech interests the peasants in the crowd, the moment serves as a reminder of a nearly contemporary, almost diametrically opposed magnum opus of Italian cinema, Bernardo Bertolucci’s decidedly political 1900 (1976).  The English subtitling of the Italian dialogue (mostly in the Bergamasque dialect) in The Tree of Wooden Clogs is somewhat sparse, giving the gist rather than the detail of what’s being said.  The soundtrack also includes church bells and Bach organ music.  The latter – on the face of it, a surprisingly sublime choice – seems to reflect the film-maker’s view of his characters, despite their indigent circumstances, as in a state of grace.  As well as writing the screenplay, Olmi did the cinematography.  This is an instance where the use of natural light is both apt and satisfying.

    Olmi’s decision to cast non-professionals, including some who actually make their living on Lombardy farms, also pays off handsomely.  He could have searched the ranks of pro actors for years and not come up with the magnetic collection of faces assembled here.  Besides, the cast aren’t simply being themselves.  Even allowing that the pace of change in rural communities has continued to be much slower than in towns and cities, it’s hard to believe their way of life hasn’t altered at all in the interval of eighty years between the setting of the story and the making of the film.  The performers must have drawn on imagination as well as personal experience to animate their characters.  Untrained actors may not be the only reason why the film has drawn comparison with Italian neo-realist cinema of the late 1940s but the style and structure are very different from, say, Vittorio De Sica’s Shoeshine (1946) and Bicycle Thieves (1948).  Where the De Sica narratives are succinct and eventful, Olmi’s storytelling is unhurried and often descriptive.  He moves easily between quasi-documentary and drama; it’s a hallmark of the film that the more dramatic moments, when they do occur, never feel forced and gain impact from matter-of-factness.  At just over three hours, The Tree of Wooden Clogs is longer than Shoeshine and Bicycle Thieves put together but Ermanno Olmi doesn’t waste a minute.

    29 October 2021

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