I don’t know how to react to an Indiewire report about Wes Anderson‘s latest, The French Dispatch, a 20th Century journalism saga with three parallel storylines and set in Paris. Shooting recently began in Angoulême, France. The ensemble cast includes Timothee Chalamet, Bill Murray, Benicio del Toro, Frances McDormand, Jeffrey Wright and Tilda Swinton.
Bullshit HE speculation: Pic is set sometime in the early days of the French nouvelle vague (’59 or ’60). Just a thought, just a guess, insect antennae, etc.
Will The French Dispatch follow the lead of my favorite Anderson film of the last few years, The Grand Budapest Hotel? I liked ghat 2014 film because it came close to stepping outside of “Andersonville,” that carefully styled, ultra-hermetic world that Wes’s films and characters always reside in. Wes will always be Wes, but I’m craving darker, heavier subject matter. In ’07 I suggested that he remake Jean-Luc Godard‘s Weekend.
“I’d really like to see an Anderson flick about adult characters dealing with adult-type stuff. They can act like adolescents all they want, but enough with the precious adolescents and stop-motion animals and robots and bright young obsessives with father issues. We need a Wes movie about guys in their late 30s or 40s who don’t come from inherited wealth and have had to scrap to survive and who ride motorcycles and fuck well and have more or less found their place in life.” — from a 3.23.12 HE post called “End of Phase One.”