Cohorted Cult

All this is to say that in the modern day, what makes an artwork successful is if its form matches, or at least points towards, its content. The French Dispatch is structured around a series of vignettes presented as magazine articles printed in the final issue of the French foreign bureau of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun newspaper, a premise which succeeds in being a charming enough excuse for an anthology. The third plot stars Timotheé Chalamet as a revolutionary on the barricades of May ‘68, who is the subject of Frances McDormand’s investigative reporting. McDormand’s performance drags its feet (second only to Bill Murray’s moribund turn) even when she manages to bed the young heartthrob, as if he’s just another notch on her bedpost. Chalamet on the other hand portrays a man with nothing between his ears but the Gauloise on his lips with unsurprising ease. Anderson seems to think he’s paying homage to Jean Luc Godard’s La Chinoise, but it’s difficult to tell if he knows how insulting he is being. Godard’s young affluent Maoists were clueless and inept but they were at least literate, responding to the very real terrors of French colonial violence and a recent memory of Nazi occupation. Anderson’s student radicals, gathered around a yellow (not red) flag, vandalise the walls of Paris with their grand slogan “LES ENFANTS SON GROGNONS” (“the children are grumpy!”). The faintest spectre of the revolutionary tradition is convoked by the pseudo-Althusserian jargon of Chalamet’s girlfriend as she rails against impérialisme and the misére of the masses travailleuses before departing the barricade, on McDormand’s orders, to make love to her boyfriend. 

This is, indeed, the living representation of May ‘68 in the contemporary cultural memory: students playing pretend politics using the slogans and symbols of third world liberation movements as an excuse to scrap with the police, make empty artistic gestures and eventually fizzle out like wet gunpowder into bourgeois decadence. But this was not how it was felt at the time: then, as with the protest movements of today, the dead-eyed alienated stares of the youth represented a real formlessness that they thought had overcome society. Anderson’s reduction of this artistic statement to a cartoon should be applauded for, however unconsciously, bringing to life our present moment’s cynical, reactionary critique of youthful political idealism. By being able to paint this lack of content so accurately, he proves yet again art’s inability to align itself with the real movement of history. This is where the movie gained both its stars: it did a great job of making me feel terrible. If Wes Anderson ever asked my advice, I would tell him to practice drawing birds.