Wes anderson has a unique and unmistakable style, to the point that he is probably the most recognizable current Hollywood director. That has earned him millions of fans, but there are also other viewers that he has never finished conquering. There is nothing wrong with it either, because if you try to make everyone happy, you will most likely end up doing something completely inconsequential.
With ‘The French Chronicle’, his new feature film that hit Spanish cinemas on October 22, it is clear that Anderson has not the slightest interest in leaving behind all those obsessions that have defined his cinema until now. In fact, it almost appears to be an attempt to raise them to full power, resulting in a work that contains both the best and the worst of his cinema.
Unmistakable
It is going to say a lot that ‘The French Chronicle’ is a Wes Anderson love song to journalism, but not to that trade in general, but to a very specific way of doing it. In fact, it does not even bother to hide that it is a tribute to the New Yorker and many of the people who wrote in that emblematic publication, to the point that it even adopts a narrative structure that seeks, in its own way, to imitate that of an issue of that magazine.
This leads to ‘The French Chronicle’ having a certain nature of story suspended in time, as if the different stories that shape the film were a kind of fables alien to reality. Not even his characters behave in such a way that it is plausible to think that none of this could really happen, but it is that his intention is not that, but to find a kind of comforting state of mind in which the how matters much more than the what. .
From there arises a character gallery that has a lot of big kids than functional adults, but taking that to his ground, which means dialogues impossible in themselves, but written in such a way that they could only have come out of Anderson’s mind. And it is that in ‘The French Chronicle’ everything is again measured in detail, once again showing his habitual obsessions regarding the staging, from the precision of the framing to the use of colors and the use of a photograph with almost painterly tints.
Unequal
However, there is something in ‘The French Chronicle’ that reveals that This is more of a quirk on Anderson’s part than anything else. That leads him to fearlessly delight in a universe that depending on who you ask will define you as fascinating, eccentric or pedantic. The irrefutable thing is that it is something unique and very pampered in formal terms, but at the moment of truth it suffers from a common evil in this type of proposal: it is quite uneven.
I have no doubt that each one will have a story with which they connect the most. Personally, the one that hit me the worst was the second one, with that singular student protest that offers a lot on the surface, but on the substance it feels empty. It is not that in the rest the content prevails over the form, but they do have something that seduces you, like that use of animation in the third with designs that bring to mind Franco-Belgian comics more than Anderson’s previous works in this field.
In his favor a cast totally devoted to the cause that connects very well with what Anderson requires of them, but there is also a certain feeling of overload of familiar faces so that then very few characters have the opportunity to breathe, to be more than pawns within the beautiful and extravagant board that Anderson presents.
Obviously, the director of ‘The Great Budapest Hotel’ or ‘Moonrise Kingdom’ cannot be asked to suddenly go against the tide of his work, but that does not mean a carte blanche to do whatever he wants and applaud him for being true to himself. same. There are simply a lot of stimuli here, some work and some don’t, because you want to be fizzy continuously and more than once you run out of gas.
In short
‘The French Chronicle’ is somewhat far from Anderson’s most inspired works, but it is not the least interesting of them either, but it is probably the most irregular, because as soon as it catches you with that spell that it is only capable of, it leaves you wondering if it was really worth telling this.