On The French Dispatch
There are times when writing deadlines loom, and the only hedge against nagging other todos is to put on a quiet movie seen several times before. The difficult task at hand is comforted by something repeating itself in the background. Repetition being impossible, the hermeneutic spiral kicks in and a scene inevitably jumps out (I’m thinking of Kierkegaard and Ricoeur at this point). Here’s one such example from Wes Anderson’s typically idiosyncratic The French Dispatch (2021). The movie gravitates around a menagerie of dislocated journalists. It’s “set in an outpost of an American newspaper in a fictional twentieth century French city that brings to life a collection of stories published in ‘The French Dispatch Magazine’.” At one point near the end of the film, the managing editor, Arthur [Bill Murray], comments upon something missing in one of Roebuck’s [Jeffrey Wright] essays for the Tastes and Smells section about a chef named Nescaffier [Steve Park]. There’s an awkward tension in the air that will be familiar to anyone who has ever had a critic look over their carefully crafted work.
“Arthur: Nescaffier only gets one line of dialogue.
Roebuck: Well, I did cut something he told me. It made me too sad. I could stick it back in, if you like.
Arthur: What did he say?”
The film cuts to Nescaffier, lying on a medical recovery bed, after having eaten a poisoned radish in a scheme to save the police chief’s son.
“Nescaffier: They had a flavor.
Roebuck: I beg your pardon?
Nescaffier: The toxic salts in the radishes. They had a flavour. Something unfamiliar to me. Like a bitter, moldy, peppery, spicy, oily kind of earth. I never tasted that taste in my life. Not entirely pleasant, extremely poisonous, but still a new flavour. That’s a rare thing at my age.
Roebuck: I admire your bravery, lieutenant.
Nescaffier: I’m not brave. I just wasn’t in the mood to be a disappointment to everybody. I’m a foreigner you know.
Roebuck: The city is full of us isn’t it? I’m one myself.
Nescaffier: Seeking something missing. Missing something left behind.
Roebuck: Maybe with good luck we’ll find what eluded us in the places we once called home. ”
The film returns to Arthur and Roebuck’s editorial tête-à-tête, which now seems to be intimating an underlying theme. The movie wanders through several quite different and equally eccentric stories from the magazine. At times, you’re left wondering if there would be any actual paying subscribers in an era where print was the primary medium of distribution. However, this scene impresses a profound feeling of nostalgia or the pain that arises when you miss something that can never return. It seemed to me that on this day, The French Dispatch was about an often unspoken feature of cosmopolitan life.
“Arthur: That’s the best part of the whole thing. That’s the reason for it to be written.
Roebuck: I couldn’t agree less.
Arthur: Well, anyway, don’t cut it.”
