The French Dispatch Ending & Every Magazine Section Meaning Explained

screenrant.com:

The French Dispatch ending cements Wes Anderson’s tribute to journalism of days past. The narrative structure didn’t land with all film critics, but others celebrated Anderson’s ingenuity in truly capturing the big-screen feeling of a 1960s-era magazine issue. This isn’t the first movie in which Wes Anderson has paid tribute to certain media types and pursuits of past eras, such as his critically divisive 2004 film The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, serving as a love letter to oceanography and the work of Jacques Cousteau. Anderson has been described as one of the most literary directors in the modern film landscape, so it’s no surprise The French Dispatch takes on the most literary structure of his films since 2001’s The Royal Tenenbaums.

The 2021 movie has also been described by critics and fans as the most Wes Anderson movie to date; however cliché the description is, it’s not incorrect. The French Dispatch is Wes Anderson at his most nostalgic, his most technically enhanced, and the quirkiest conception of his characters. It’s also a cartoonish ode to French culture that many have compared to his tribute to Japanese culture in the movie Isle of Dogs, though the latter film was also criticized for fetishization. On the contrary, The French Dispatch is an Americanized version of quaint France, following expatriate journalists who settle their Kansas publication in the fictional French town of Ennsui-sur-Blasé. Nonetheless, French pop culture is heavily interspersed throughout The French Dispatch, with subtle French phrases, tributes to great 1960s directors like Truffaut, and inclusions of bygone French singers. It also doesn’t seem coincidental that Anderson recruited Timothée Chalamet, a half-French American, as one