The French Dispatch and Francophilia in Film
Image Credit: @kylenicklachlan (Twitter)
Wes Anderson’s latest painting-made-film comes in the form of The French Dispatch, a three-part story following several people through a series of events documented by a recently-deceased newspaper owner. Set in the fictional town of Ennui, the film takes from the get-go a Francophile sound and look, with subtitled French dialogue peppered in with the English, and an opening sequence that consists of Owen Wilson in his beret, cycling through any number of Parisian-looking tableaux that could be straight out a photography book, or a gap-year Instagram page. The feeling of it all is a romantic version of French culture, one to which both the American and English film industries are prone.
To examine this closer, it seems apt to examine the perception of French culture in English-speaking countries. There is a definite association in English culture that to speak and read in the French language and to consume French art is to be of a high class, of a sophisticated mind, of wealth and good nature. Especially with so-called ‘Parisian’ culture, there is a sense of elevation, a superiority over those who do not speak French, and a classy alienation to the inclusion of French elements in American and English cinema. Although most of the audience may not be able to understand that which is spoken, both the sound and the subtitles allow the viewer to imagine themselves in the position of high-brow consumer of ‘French’ art without straying too far for the comfort of familiar cinema. For example, long periods of monochrome and bilingual dialogue scenes are reminiscent of classic cinema techniques to make a film seem ‘exotic’ or ‘foreign’, but on occasion, the French interspersed into the dialogue seems to serve no purpose but to have French included in the film for an aesthetic reason rather than a functional one.
Take, for example, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, another famously multilingual film from an American heavyweight filmmaker. The function of multiple languages in Basterds is one of circumstance, and the audience is offered scenes that are almost entirely in French or German with matter-of-fact delivery that feels logical and perfectly placed. Given that the characters interacting are French or German, why would they speak accented English for a whole film, especially in scenes with no English people in them? As well as native language use, Tarantino also employs cultural oddities that are not those of the romantic fashion often employed in film, which tends towards inaccuracy, but rather those that are significant and subtle – the infamous three-finger scene is an excellent example of this, and it gives the impression that German language and culture are not being used for appearances, but instead for plot-relevant reason.
This is not to say that The French Dispatch does not have some reason behind its utilisation of French (both language and culture, in as loose a sense of the term as it is). On the contrary, Wes Anderson’s stylisation of film lends itself perfectly to the way in which French culture is interpreted in American cinema, and the fact that the film sits in a city of the uncanny allows Anderson to play with his ‘French’ elements in a fashion that seems less out of place than it might in a realistic drama. Characters jumping between French and English seems less out of place in a film whose dialogue and delivery is unnatural by design, and the design elements that lean into Frenchness are gimmicky and cartoonish rather than attempting to be authentic and sophisticated. As well as this, Anderson’s use of French culture may appear here to be a voluntary choice rather than a reduction of culture to its stereotypes. The use of French performers is of significance in this consideration; in dialogue, the French performers are the ones speaking French, and the English or American performers are those speaking English. In this way, the film does feel less like a reduction, and more like a satirical mockery of the Anglophone audiences. The cartoonish nature of the dialogue and the heavily stereotyped imagery would suggest at satire more than genuine belief that this is engagement with French culture.
The French Dispatch is a film that is steeped in an American interpretation of what French culture looks like, but cannot allow its characters to be full-fledged French people for fear of alienating its English-speaking audience too greatly. Anderson appears, in part, to be mocking this particular brand of Hollywood French. His fear may not be of alienating his audience through language. Instead, it could be said that he is making a harmless mockery of those same audience members who see French as a signifier of sophistication. In doing so, he manages to play on French stereotypes often found in English and American cinema to add to the film, rather than cheapening it by adding these elements without reason.