本文中文版。

by TWY

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Solitude of the Mise-en-scène

“I make films to keep myself busy. If I had the strength, I’d do nothing at all. Because I can’t bear to do nothing, I make films,” said Marguerite Duras through the mouth of a character in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1980 film, Every Man for Himself ; and some forty years later, in his film The French Dispatch, the Texas-born Parisian Wes Anderson would name his fictitious city “Ennui-sur-Blasé”, which translates to “indifferently bored.” It is a funny provocation, yet also might serves as Exhibit A for the film’s many distractors after its Cannes premiere, accusing it as tedious, characterless and emotionless. It was anything but that. “The French Dispatch” is also the name of the film’s main subject, an American magazine published in Ennui, the New Yorker-inspired home to many authors created by Anderson, based on famous contributors to that legendary journal. It is also the editorial office where they write, curate and edit articles as a collective. At Ennui, in its nostalgic beauty that reminded us of the comedies of Jacques Tati or musicals of Rene Clair, these writers exist as a band of outsiders, who chronicle the numerous events that unfolds: events of arts, politics, culinary, some humorous, and many murderous. Nevertheless, in the end, all above things had never really existed, for they all came from the imagination of one author; we can imagine that Paris was too big for Anderson, that he must make his own, recalling a saying of Ernst Lubitsch: “I’ve been to Paris, France and I’ve been to Paris, Paramount. I think I prefer Paris, Paramount…” (Peter Bogdanovich wrote this in his book Pieces of Time, as told by Garson Kanin.) Like Lubitsch’s studio films, Wes Anderson’s city is a dollhouse, a sandcastle, where all the roads and neighborhoods, like miniatures, are compressed and installed layers upon layers, and inhabited by caricatures of all kinds, all rolled into a croissant dough, ready to be fermented into its glowing, multi-layered glory.

With its many layers of things and décor, cartoonish movements and caricatures, the film can be easily misunderstood as some hollow parodies of a bygone era and empty formalist practice. There is some truth to that, but that is precisely because Anderson, here, had reached his final form, an aesthetic consistency which can appear only as a display of childlike stereotypes, many already associated with him: symmetrical images, tracking shots, theatrical presentations, international movie stars, “May ’68”, The New Yorker, modern arts, French cuisine, and so forth. However, all that are, nonetheless, just the first layer of the film. In Anderson’s blocking as well as the film’s promotional posters, overwhelmed by the abundance of characters that filled the screen, we wonder exactly where to look at, but behind this body lies Anderson’s true secret of this film, which can only be summed as a relentless folding, a sophisticated packaging, an act of hiding. But to what purpose? What is the core hidden inside of these folds?

In the prologue of the film, presented as an obituary of Arthur Howitzer, Jr. (Bill Murray), the magazine’s editor-in-chief, we have been told that the late editor’s favorite note to his writer is “try to make it sounded like you wrote it that way on purpose.” We also learned that the man detested cheap sentimentality, above his office door writes “No Crying”, but what is he hiding under there? Consider the opposite situation, if Anderson had purposefully overstuffed the film with an overwhelming number of things and characters, then all of these things must be all, unequivocally and absolutely, alone, with “an immediately perceptible air of sadness,” to quote The Narrator of his previous live-action film, The Grand Budapest Hotel. However, being the film that wishes to maintain its so-called “journalistic neutrality,” the loneliness of Ennui and its inhabitants is not an immediately perceptible one, even as hints of it being scattered across the narrative. The French Dispatch is, perhaps, one of the radical films about loneliness ever made, and we can add to this list: Mariano Llinas’ La Flor, David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return, and Jacques Rivette’s Out 1, all works of extreme length, but as those filmmakers extend the sense of loneliness through duration, Anderson packaged it with maximalism, a spatial mise-en-abyme. In fact, despite the eventual realization, the film combats its loneliness in the act of creating a collective, a team of creative people coming together, and in time, slowly and surely, forget that they are ever alone. In the multiple layering of space and time, form and content, Anderson displays a blooming creativity, even when his “Paris, Paramount” is that of the past. Perhaps this sense of histoire terminé is precisely the origin of his ennui-sur-blasé, the origin of his solitude, and the origin of his writing, for one always writes alone and after the fact. Thus, in this boredom, in this solitude of unable to truly reach the past, what does a writer do?

Despite loneliness being a theme to the film, at least to this author, it was surrounded by layers upon layers of formal inventions and storytelling. First, the form of a magazine; second, the act of narrating; and the third, the bulk of the film, which consists of five “articles” of the magazine’s final issue: the obituary of Howitzer, Jr., which provide the film with temporal structure, not unlike Citizen Kane; Sazerac’s (Owen Wilson) travelogue, where a brief introduction to the town is given, albeit a personal and “indecent” one, an bombarding sequence of situations and overwhelming mysteries; then, the first main course, titled “The Concrete Masterpiece,” in which the author, Berensen (Tilda Swinton), narrates the wild tale between Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio Del Toro), an imprisoned abstract printer, an art dealer (Adrien Brody), and the artist’s model/muse/prison guard, Simone (Léa Seydoux), which is also further presented as a scholarly lecture given by the author; next is “Revision to a Manifesto” by Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand), a parodied version of the student movement took place in Paris during May of 1968, completed with its Parisian cafes, tear gas, pop songs of the ye-ye era, and a set of Godardian/Garrelien young revolutionaries and student leaders, interpreted by Timothée Chalamet, Lyna Khoudri and etc.; and finally, Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright), an African-American writer partly inspired by James Baldwin, narrates an encounter he had at the police department, where a graceful dinner prepared by Lieutenant Nescaffier (Stephen Park), the “great exemplar of the mode of cuisine known as police cooking”, turned into a prolonged battle with a group of mobster (led by Edward Norton’s “The Chauffeur”), who had kidnapped the Commissaire’s son, an exciting chapter which, yet again, is represented not just as an article, but a performance in which Wright, at a talk show, displays his extraordinary “typographic memory,” and it is here where Anderson’s true intention would be finally revealed. 

An article begins, an article ends, another one begins, each opens in their unique title card, with the clicking of the typewriter, and all ends with a decisive cut-to-black. As one can see, all five articles are independent from one another, and yet, they are undeniably intertwined in an abstract fashion, which would all end up in the mythical kitchen of Nescaffier. This is true of many great “anthology” films, for instance, Llinas’ La Flor, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, or Eric Rohmer’s Les rendez-vous de Paris, and all stories or chapters amongst these films had to be put together in a particular order, and it would be unwise to see them as merely a grouping of stand-alone short films. They are more sections of the same fugue, much like the many “partitions” shown in Anderson’s film, among those railings, barricades and windows we see everywhere in the film’s mise-en-scene, with its dolly shots traveling back and forth, theatrical cues that punctuate each scene – artificial, even mechanical, yet very much human.

Mise-en-scène of the Solitude

These five main “texts” of The French Dispatch were also depicted with a suspicious neutrality, and such neutrality is crucial for the film. While Anderson uses the composition of a physical magazine as the film’s main structure, he also discusses the act of writing itself. This writing in the film is a writing that, ideally, forbids any autobiographical intents, to which Jeffery Wright’s character elaborated: “Self-reflection is a vice best conducted in private or not at all.” If that is the case, what should a writer write about, in a film about writers? The answer, first and foremost, is the others – other people and characters, other passions or professions, with a sense of journalistic neutrality. However, as The French Dispatch, the film and the magazine, unfolds in its five instinct chapters, the audience will not only see the stories they tell, they will also travel through the writer’s telling of their stories, lifting the mist of neutrality in the process, and finally arrives at the end, becomes a healthy self-portrait, the thing that is behind all this neutrality, the author himself. For a film that opens with an obituary, and for an article detailing the lives of “rats, vermin, gigolos, streetwalkers,” it is surprisingly light-weighted in its tone, where the author has no other intents other than describing what he sees. When Tilda Swinton, in her article/lecture, describes her “tortured artist,” she attempted to tell it with a general perspective; she tried to tell this bizarre rendition of the modern art history without her feeling, but this does not prevent her from accidentally display a nude picture of hers (with Rosenthaler hiding behind a canvas) on the lecture hall, like how the sudden nakedness of Lea Seydoux’s character came as a shock; and it did not prevent her revealing to her editor-in-chief that Rosenthaler and her used to be lovers. All these personal details threatens “neutrality”, to which the writer must hastily and succinctly relate. Again, this can be seen as lacking emotions or being too confined by formalism, but let us keep ourselves a bit further from the subject, and try to preserve their secrets. Anderson slowly reveals them, patiently, obscuring the possibility that this lecture, this passion for an artist by a global society, was nothing but her self-reflection on her past passion for him. The most moving shot of the chapter: Tony Revolori, who plays a young Rosenthaler, sits in his prison cell, and then Del Toro walks in with an identical costume, replacing the young Revolori, who passes his prison tag to him.

From this point and forward, Anderson begins to slowly unravel of the film’s eternal loneliness, that if the story of the artist had largely maintained its journalistic neutrality, the next chapter, “Revision to a Manifesto,” would show the exact opposite end of this spectrum of ethics. Almost immediately, we see that the author and her subject are in an intimate relationship, sharing the same bed as both of their writings are in progress – no more taboos. However, this writer, played by McDormand, is a stubborn one. Her short-lived relationship with Chalamet’s student leader only intensifies her long-sustained bachelorship, as she turns down a potential suitor (Christophe Waltz) set up by her subject’s parents, and what we genuinely do not know, is whether or not her romance with the young revolutionary is not just a byproduct of her work as a writer. Despite this, when the question about neutrality is raised, she would once again insist upon it, just as the mechanical mise-en-scene of the whole “revolution”: barricades and roadblocks under a bridge, a chess move which must be transported through a series of domino motions, traveling through the signs of the student, the megaphone of the riot police, and through the secretary’s ear to her dolly-shot-punctuated walk across the mayor’s archive, and finally to the bureaucrat himself, surrounded by a dozen of government officials. Once again, Anderson plays with layers upon layers of information and movements, problems and designs, total virtuoso, but how are they necessary? We must now consider the fact that it is May ’68 that is being examined, but in the actual history of events that unfolded during and before that fateful month, us, cinephiles of the post-post-New-Wave generations, were only covered by ambiguity, while its actual political outcome more or less obscured. Everyone talks about the 60s, but so drowned in nostalgia. Anderson and the author of this chapter also chose to put politics to the side. Things were discussed, true: should corporate-produced pop songs be banned? Should students launch a revolt against drafting? However, the supposed actual subject of the story, this so-called Manifesto by Chalamet’s character, was never really read – it was either disrupted by other forces or drowned in the murmuring of Lyna Khoudri, mixed in with anger and confusion.

It is clear that Anderson had chosen to distance his characters from the true complexity of political actions. He is more interested in the movements of youth and the art that came from it, and here, what he inherits are a lineage of French films made around the era, from Godard’s Masculin Feminin to the increasingly political La Chinoise, which anticipated May ’68, and to the depictions of its immediate aftermath in the experimental works by Philippe Garrel, Jackie Raynal and Marcel Hanoun, all the way to Rivette’s Out 1 and Jean Eustache’s La Maman et la Putain, two films that observed the lost of political innocence in their passionate longueurs. It reminds, also, of the leftist turn of the film journal Cahiers du cinéma, and the film community’s defense for their shared mentor, Henri Langlois of the Cinémathèque Française, in an event that precede May ’68 where the French government dismissed this leading figure of film preservation against his will. None of these films and movements could explain the true essence of their politics, but the fact remained that they were unforgettable portraits of a generation of youth – what was filmed were acts of encountering and forming of collectives, movements of romance and friendship, and then acts of debating, arguing, and dissolving. These journeys existed because of May ’68, which also marked their end; they are stories about both collectivism and solitude. To return to Anderson’s film and his depiction of such events, we see, yet again, the parallel between different collectives. Although, in order to focus on the featured articles, Anderson chose to include only small vignettes of the behind-the-scene stories inside his fictional editorial office, we, too, can see the same creative process paralleled in the debating and clashing of those student revolutionaries, in their cafe gatherings, secret rendezvouses and romances, to the extend that we no longer distinguish their real cries from those provoked by tear gas. The most moving of the chapter: when we finally discovered the proper revision of that manifesto, what we read was only a love letter, with its neon-lit, slow-motion shots of young man and women on their motorcycles under the artificial moonlights, “additional sentence at bottom of page completely indecipherable due to poor penmanship.”

The third and final featured article, “The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner,” was the saddest story of them all, a tale of a truly lonely man. However, yet again, its potential sentimentality was well hidden under the protection of what we called language, with its secret transmitted only through the whispers from quick notes of a mere closeup, adhering the laws of the Morse codes. Together with the gunshots and screams of the night, Anderson is about to reveal the darkest corner of his dollhouse, yet it is still told through caricatures, because “no crying”, an editor-in-chief once commanded. It’s been made clear at this point that to show a man’s loneliness, one needs to show how well he hides it. A sense of professionalism can be found in the act of Jeffery Wright’s reading, which goes along with the extended tracking shots used in the sequences, for it relates to the rhythm of his speech: velvety like the beverage he drank at the commissioner’s table, with every sentences evenly distributed, and every word decisive like his total recall. To read seemingly without feeling, but with confidence and precision, leaving the secrets behind to imagination. As this author channels the spirit of Baldwin, Anderson once again puts the story in a “police society”, which is never a coincidence considering his depiction of the prison system and the riot police in previous stories, and this time he makes it clear that the town of “Ennui” is not the nostalgic paradise sugar-coated with colors of macarons. At its core, we found the fear of a little boy when he is strolling the town at night, which was foreshadowed in Owen Wilson’s short travelogue. However, this little boy, in his playfulness and revolting spirit, has the ability to transform any darkness into his game of danger and adventure.

And so, we find ourselves entering the game, as Wright, alone, navigates through the corridors of the city’s police headquarter, in one of the film’s most masterfully executed dolly shots, crossing all the cubicles and sections, finally arriving at the dark space surrounding a “Chicken Coop” – slung for solitary confinement, in which the face of an incarcerated man (Willem Dafoe) pops up like a puppet, and this sense of confinement confirms the grand design behind all the cubicles we see throughout the film, from Rosenthaler’s prison cell, the concrete in which the artist painted his tableaux, to the student leader’s “maid chamber,” and ultimately, this is all Anderson has been leading towards. And now suddenly, in a rare flashback, we found the author inside the “Chicken Coop,” in the name of “false love.” This time, it is his future employer who saved him, in a beautiful yet serious moment – as the editor-in-chief turns a prison visit into a job interview, requesting Wright to pen a quick book review of three hundred words, he suddenly said: “however you go about it, try to make it sounded like you wrote it that way on purpose.” All is revealed, and it turns out there is an author behind every notions, bombastic or quiet, as a collective or alone, and an author can only write in the confinement of their own room, hiding whatever that is behind their solitude, but left behind just a touch of the thing we called “style”, in the hope that it shall to be found by readers of the future, friends who they will never meet. In his lively telling/retelling of this police drama, we come to realize the fact that this whole poisonous affair was, in fact, very little of his business, whether it be the shootout between the gang and the police force, all our author did was simply being there, and to faithfully transcribe it on paper; besides everything that is happening in the story, our author remained an outsider, but so was the great chef whose cooking, which almost got himself killed, saved the abducted boy’s life. Furthermore, when the tracking shot arrives at the hideout of the gangs, we found all of them each in confinement – they are all in the swirl of the event, yet remained a stranger to its nature. At the end of the story, we saw that Wright had almost deleted the best and only dialogue between him and the chef, which the editor-in-chief mercifully saved, a dialogue precisely about the otherness of their existences. To conclude, it can be said that the reason behind our author’s typographic memory is this: because the words are his sole companion, and it is only these words that he repeats to himself, in the infinite confinement of solitude. These shots are scattered around the film: Wright crying silently in the Coop; Simone, the painter’s muse, marching through the concrete that bears her abstracted body, hidden in the strokes; a boy in the closet looking into the blue eyes of the girl (Saoirse Ronan) outside; a writer, facing against the camera, typing, while her editor reads her previous piece, sitting 6-feet apart; a chef who is surrounded by its mythical mise-en-scene of culinary; a young boy hiding in the bath…… After a brief moment to consider his sadness, Wright quickly returns to his narration: “Meanwhile…” Wes Anderson is a creator, and whatever loneliness there was, he will create forms and stories, each with their infinite variations.

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“Solitude de la mise-en-scène, mise-en-scène de la solitude.”
(L’enfant secret, 1980, dir. Philippe Garrel)