Movie/TV Show Reviews:

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  Jean Renoir used to say that a true author makes one film throughout his life. Wes Anderson never looked for a metaphor in these words. Hearing the hits of the 70s, seeing the symmetrical precision of the frame, strolling through Art Nouveau interiors and drowning in a pastel ocean, we can guess by one note - the author of "The Brilliant Clan" and "Moonrise Kingdom" is alive, doing well and continuing to make his film. In the French Courier, his formal vocabularies have been used for years. Just look at the interwar covers of The New Yorker and tell us that Anderson is not coming to us in a time machine. Although the title "Kurier" is created as a French edition of a daily from Kansas, associations with the cult American publishing house are more than obvious. You don't have to wait for the film's final dedication to the giants of James Baldwin or Lillian Ross, so that in the person of the editor-in-chief, Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Bill Murray) to discover the founder of "The New Yorker", Harold Ross, and in the repatriates from his team - a journalistic, post-war dream team. Howitzer is a larger figure than cinema here, and his people - from the liberated art expert J.K.L. Berensen (Tilda Swinton) to Lucinda Kremenez (Frances McDormand) listening to the pulse of the street - they are only slightly smaller than life. As the soft-voiced narrator Anjelica Huston argues, the French band opens America's "window to the world". And what a world this is! In the fictional town of Ennsui-sur-Blasé, life goes on in sixth gear. A brilliant artist (Benicio Del Toro) rots behind bars, entangled in an affair with a security guard and also his muse (Lea Seydoux), student protests led by Zefirelli (Timothee Chalamet) and suppressed by an army of police chess players take place in the streets, and an outstanding journalist stylized as Baldwin Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright) unravels the secrets of the work of an outstanding cook, and by the way participates in the police hunt for a group of kidnappers. I would like to write that something is missing here, but there is even a budget version of the Zampano strongman and Owen Wilson falling off his bike into the depths of the underground passage. Politics, society, culture, sport, cuisine - separate topics, people in the field, deadline for yesterday. "Window to the World" is primarily a window on the history of cinema and the press. Anderson's ostentatiously "Fish-Chinese" and conventional stage design is used mainly for spiritualist screenings - the ghosts of new wave artists, slapstick masters, neorealists and legends of the journalistic profession glide across the screen. The following chapters of the film correspond to the articles from the latest issue of "Kurier". And although the quality of the novels is uneven, Anderson's unmistakable style ennobles all of them - perhaps because it turns out to be a perfect, visual equivalent to the stylized language of the articles and the form of the publishing house itself. The director weaves into his film animation stylized on the graphics of the legendary Rei Irvin, he uses cardboard set design straight from Cooper and Shoedsack's King Kong, and the static image, reminiscent of a press mock-up, enlivens with surprising counterpoints - as in the scene of the interview with Roebuck Wright stylized as talks of the golden era American television. However, "French Courier, Distributor Gone Mad with Such a Long Title" is more than a candy for the eyes and a venerable homage. A sudden close-up of the protagonist's confused face worked well in Anderson's cinema as maintaining tension before the punch line of the joke - but during a journalistic confrontation, it means more. A long tracking shot used to be a nice idea for an exhibition - here, quite literally, it extends the horizon of truth and marks the border of a lie. And the so-called whip pan (a rapid, perspective-changing camera movement) was an unparalleled comedy device - in the latest film it is used as if the director is pulling us by the ear towards something much more interesting. You know more or less where this is all heading. "The Courier" may be fun, film studies, but to my private delight, it also says something serious about journalism. He defines it as an unwavering awareness of time and place - constant balancing between "participation in the present" and the impossibility of interfering with the described reality, and the search for truth through a lively dialogue. And perhaps with this single reflection, Anderson discovers a deeper truth about the nature of the profession than a dozen other directors lamenting the death of the press. In the will of Arthur Howitzer Jr. we read that "Kurier" is to disappear from the face of the earth with its last breath. It's not a credible test of professional ethics, but it's probably the funniest joke Anderson can come up with in his beautiful love letter to Ross, The New Yorker, and the press that "isn't being made anymore." As long as the curious flock to the windowsill, the window to the world must remain open.

  12/27/2022