Two artistic entries in the Cannes competition: Wes Anderson’s “The French Dispatch” and “Bergman Island” by Mia Hansen-Løve.
Hollywood has never had much sympathy for journalism, except for heroic war reporters. And what people think of us columnists, the classic “Alles über Eva” is a good example: The theater columnist played by George Sanders explains it casually: “We critics belong to the theater like ants to a picnic.”
Maybe that’s why we love Cannes so much, where the festival gives its best accreditations not to the producers but to the press. And still treats film critics with the same respect today as they did sixty years ago when the “Nouvelle Vague” of French film art was recruited from critics.
We must of course exclude Wes Anderson from those who despise critics. His new film “The French Dispatch” is a double homage, both to the cultivated newspaper production and to the country that invented the word “Feuilleton”. The publisher and editor-in-chief of a copy of the magazine “New Yorker”, played by Bill Murray, died at the beginning of the plot. That makes him the subject of the obituary page of his last issue – because according to his will, the sheet, composed without exception by Edelfenner, is to be buried with him.
The episode film lovingly flips through all the sections and conjures up an almost superhumanly intimate connection between this heavenly-born editorial team and their topics: Tilda Swinton, for example, plays an art critic who also sees herself as a muse. What doesn’t prevent her favorite painter Moses Rosenthaler, played by Benicio del Toro, from leading a double life himself: convicted of double homicides, he opened his studio in prison, and his nude model, played by Lea Seydoux, is actually a guard there.
This is just one of many prominent stories through which Wes Anderson strolls in his typical style – framed in two-dimensional decorations and ambiguous punchlines. If you wanted to write a book about Anderson, it would be a pop-up book with magnificent tableaus and lots of footnotes. But as fondly as his cinema celebrates what it loves – here, among others, Jean-Luc Godard’s color films from the sixties – so little real emotionality dares it for itself.
Even more than his earlier films, “The French Dispatch” is a Wes Anderson museum, both inviting and at the same time distant. Completed for the canceled Cannes edition last year, the film begins with the logo of the former arthouse label “Fox Starlight”, which has meanwhile been sold to Disney. So it is already a piece of history, worthy of nostalgic memories.
In the same competition, the French director Mia Hansen-Løve proves that it is quite possible to celebrate past art without nostalgia. In “Bergman Island” a couple of filmmakers (played by Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth) spend a creative stay on the trail of the great Sweden. I remember once a Swedish film critic who knew him well passed on his simple address: “Ingmar Bergman, Fårö, Sweden”. After all, only about 500 people live on the small island. Today Bergman’s adopted home, which he fell in love with while working on his film “Like in a Mirror”, is an open-air museum for fans from all over the world.
But this cinematic homage does not fall silent in respect: the semi-documentary scenes from Ingmar Bergman’s environment are no more dominant than a primed screen. This incomparable filmmaker first dabs a feather-light relationship piece about creative differences. Designed to be completely pathos-free, it is purest anti-Bergman – only gradually (and then very Bergman-like) to play with dreams and reality.
The project that the young filmmaker tells her partner is the film adaptation of her childhood sweetheart: Mia Wasikowska plays her alter ego in this imaginary film-within-a-film. But as if this very private film material did not offer enough material for discussion for scenes of an artist marriage, the fresh impressions and encounters mix with the memories.
When has one ever seen such an unpretentious homage to an otherwise unreachable artist? Once the camera briefly roams through Bergman’s private video library, which also had space for the most popular genres (among other things, he was a fan of the series “Dallas”). There is no question that Bergman would not have missed this amazing cross between “The Smile of a Summer Night” and an inconspicuous French country house film.
Who can conjure up films as carefree and witty as Mia Hansen-Løve? In any case, the cinema could not wish for a better sign of life.
