The first trailer for Wes Anderson’s 10th feature film, The French Dispatch, is out, and to judge from it the movie contains all the familiar ingredients of a Wes Anderson joint: pastel-toned tableaus and an ensemble cast of eccentrics played by extremely well-dressed, attractive (mostly) white people.
This time the core Wes Anderson troupe has expanded to include newcomers including Timothée Chalamet, Benicio del Toro, Kate Winslet, and Elisabeth Moss, taking their places on an exhaustively long list of recognizable faces, including: Owen Wilson, Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman, Mathieu Amalric, Adrien Brody, Saoirse Ronan, Willem Dafoe, Tilda Swinton, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Christoph Waltz, Lois Smith, Henry Winkler, Rupert Friend, and Griffin Dune.
The French Dispatch—whose full title is, apparently, The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun—is billed as a “love letter to journalists,” but of a particular kind: the kind that might be found in a three-piece suit, in the sort of sanitized past that figures so prominently in Anderson-world. These are the journalists of the movie’s titular bureau, which is based in a fictional French city called “Ennui-sur-Blasé” (the movie was filmed in Angoulême), in a stylized 20th century past. In reality, the French Dispatch and many of its figures was inspired by The New Yorker, including past stories and editorial staff.
