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The fifth feature collaboration to date between the composer and Anderson has a “more American, jazzy/bluesy” feel.
You might expect music by a Paris-born composer for a film called The French Dispatch to sound distinctly French. But rather than an obvious Gallic flavour, Alexandre Desplat’s score for Wes Anderson’s latest wryly eccentric comedy drama — the fifth feature collaboration to date between the composer and the writer/director — has, to Desplat’s ears, a “more American, jazzy/bluesy” feel.
The score is just one of the unexpected elements of the film, an anthology of four unlikely stories from a fictional American magazine covering a poetic, bygone version of France. The ensemble cast includes Owen Wilson as a cycling reporter, Benicio del Toro as a criminally insane painter, Timothée Chalamet as a radical student and Edward Norton as a kidnapping chauffeur.
Following their usual practice, the composer and director talked early on about musical ideas for The French Dispatch, and Desplat was reminded of the work of the absurdist artists who launched an early 20th-century Paris-based art movement. At the core of the film, the composer felt, was “something very Dadaist, completely lacking in logic. I love the Dadaist movement’s rejection of logic and use of humour to build a work of art. So we tried to play with logic — or illogic — in the music too.”
As Anderson and Desplat continued to exchange filmed sequences and musical sketches, another goal for the score emerged. “Because the movie is so virtuosic, with such a flow of ideas,” Desplat explains, “the music also had to be sparse and minimal, to leave room for what’s on screen. It’s the opposite of what you would think — that the score should be big and active, mirroring what’s on screen.”
The result was a...