The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A black-and-white shot holds. A man, a room, the gray of reportage. Then one patch of the image turns to color, and the film moves on without explaining itself. You pick up the rule by feel: monochrome is what was reported, color is what was felt. The story doesn't change. The print process does.

Anderson built a movie in which the layout carries the meaning. That sounds like a recipe for preciousness, and it's the charge that follows him around. It's also why one of Deleuze's least fashionable terms fits this film better than any other: the lectosign, the image that has lost its self-evidence and has to be read. Most cinema is legible on contact. A hand reaches for a gun and your body knows what comes next. Here the image arrives wearing editorial apparatus: a byline, a cross-head, an aspect ratio, a film stock. The apparatus is load-bearing. When the frame narrows from anamorphic to the boxy Academy square, it works the way a change of column width works on a page. Same information, different weight.

Deleuze treats the frame as a closed set, a container of information a director can starve or stuff. Robert Yeoman and Anderson stuff it. The camera sits on axes parallel and perpendicular to the wall, dead center, faces frontal, then snaps ninety degrees to the next symmetrical arrangement. The debt is Tati: Playtime's deep-focus wides, business happening everywhere at once across a built set. But Tati lets your eye wander until it finds the gag. Anderson puts the gag in the middle and cuts. Tati's frame is a room you're loose in. Anderson's is a panel.

He also does something unusual to what Deleuze calls the relative out-of-field, the adjacent space you can't see, where cinema traditionally keeps its suspense. Anderson removes the wall. The cross-section staging, camera gliding laterally through a cutaway building room by room, is his own device, prototyped on the Belafonte in The Life Aquatic and here applied to a whole town. Nothing lurks next door, because next door is already in the shot. What replaces suspense is simultaneity: a building readable at a glance, like a spread.

Then there's the narration, which is nearly everything. Nobody in this film simply does a thing. Sazerac pedals through Ennui-sur-Blasé and lectures us about it. Roebuck Wright recounts a kidnapping in mournful, exact sentences. Every story arrives pre-written, delivered by its author from a lectern or a television studio. Deleuze has a name for action transposed into discourse instead of performed: the reflection-image, the Figure, the hinge where cinema stops moving and starts thinking about what moving would mean. The voices themselves are speech-acts in his sense — testimony and legend-making rather than dialogue, a voice that institutes an event instead of describing it. And because the speaking body is never the acting body, sound and image run on separate tracks the whole way.

Here's where a reasonable viewer digs in. If everything is reported, what's left to watch? The film's answer is that the distance between an event and the sentence about it is the drama. These narrators have vanity, they have blind spots, and their prose is where both live. The chapter Lucinda Krementz narrates is called "Revisions to a Manifesto," which tells you exactly what a journalist's neutrality is worth around here. The gap between polished copy and what the picture shows you is characterization. That's the reason the arrangement isn't decoration.

The staging works the same way. Figures freeze into painted tableaux. A police chase converts to flat hand-drawn animation, comic-strip register, because that's the panel a magazine would run. Eisenstein's montage of attractions was built to hit the viewer like a shock; Anderson's attractions are exhibits, mounted and labeled. The acting follows: deadpan, flat and fast, strong feeling delivered at the wrong volume on purpose. Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, calls this the gest, a posture that exposes a social relation rather than expressing an interior. Léa Seydoux's Simone is the clearest case. She is the imprisoned painter's model and his prison guard, and she holds both in one still, watchful stance. No scene has to explain it. The posture is the explanation.

All of this sits inside a death. Howitzer has died, and his instruction is that the magazine die with him: one final issue, then dissolution. Deleuze's late crystal has a state he takes from Visconti, where a beautifully ordered world turns out to be already decomposing, its inhabitants a beat too late for their own lives. The French Dispatch is played entirely inside that clause. The symmetry isn't there to be admired. It's there because a certain kind of person believed arranging things well was a form of care, and that person is being buried.

The grammar is inherited, and Anderson doesn't hide it. Vivre sa vie gave him numbered tableaux with printed headings and flat frontal black-and-white staging. Le Plaisir gave him the portmanteau of stories bound by a single literary voice. La Chinoise supplied the student cell in primary-color rooms with slogans on the wall, quoted straight into the May-'68 chapter. His own Grand Budapest Hotel supplied the Russian-doll narration and the per-era ratio switching. But those New Wave devices were built to break a spell. Chapter cards and address-to-camera were Brecht's tools, meant to keep you awake and skeptical. Anderson keeps every device and drops the critique. He uses distanciation for tenderness, which nobody had quite done. That's the invention, and it's why a film this arranged can still get to you at the end.

What it did to narrative is simpler than it looks. It proved a film can be organized by an editor's logic instead of a plot's: sequence rather than cause. Modern cinema, in Deleuze's account, left the gap between images open, the cut as an interval nothing crosses. Anderson closes that gap with a person. What binds these stories is one man's taste, and his death is the reason we're reading them at all. Two years later, in Asteroid City, he pushed the compartments further still. This is the film where the method found its subject.

The last thing you see is a room of writers composing an obituary together, working out how to say it. Watch it again and keep one eye on what each narrator is doing while narrating. Then wait for the color to bloom, and ask what it costs a person to keep that much feeling behind glass.