Wes Anderson takes his style traits to a paroxysm in a dazzling but exhausting film starring countless stars in which he sublimates everything he understands by French
Anyone who has seen ‘Journey to Darjeeling’, ‘Moonrise Kingdom’ or ‘The Great Budapest Hotel’ will know that Wes Anderson’s films (Houston, 1969) make you want to stop the projection to recreate each shot, such is the avalanche of information and the amount of detail that this unique director offers in an inimitable filmography. Filmed a couple of years ago (Anderson is currently filming ‘Asteroid City’ in the Madrid town of Chinchón), ‘The French Chronicle’ takes those style features to a paroxysm. This means that the fans of the Texan director will enjoy themselves like pigs in a quagmire, while the rest will remain out of the proposal.
One recommendation: avoid looking for a narrative thread and letting yourself be carried away by Anderson’s digressions, who like a Russian doll tells stories within others and accumulates characters embodied by the usual troupe of actors who love to work under his command . The demiurge of the function could not be other than Bill Murray, who plays a wealthy heir who indulges in founding a select information weekly, in the style of the ‘New Yorker’ magazine, in a French city suspiciously similar to Paris. and called Ennui-sur-Blasé (Villahastío de la Desgana).
In the manner of the ‘Liberty weekly, Kansas Evening Sun’, the film offers us an obituary, a travel guide and three reports. The best of them is the first, starring Benicio del Toro giving life to a brilliant painter locked up in a jail and Lea Seydoux as his guardian and muse. The second is inspired by the student riots of May 68 and the third, which has to do with a great chef and a police station, even gives us a cartoon chase through the streets of Paris, sorry, Ennui.
Benicio del Toro and Lea Seydoux, a dangerous and brilliant painter and his guardian and muse.
Stop button
Set in a vague period between the 1950s and 1970s, the film is something of a sublimation of everything Anderson understands French. The cinema of Tati, Tintin, Truffaut, the ‘chanson’ … The references are so many and the speed at which the action takes place is such that, indeed, the desire arises to hit the stop button to count the payroll of stars who lend themselves to the game: Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, Adrien Brody, Owen Wilson, Timothée Chalamet, Christoph Waltz, Anjelica Huston … Dazzling sketches … that end up exhausting like a binge of chocolates.
.