Wes Anderson's 'The French Dispatch' gets a suitably quirky first trailer

Searchlight Pictures has today released the first trailer for Isle of Dogs director Wes Anderson’s ‘love letter to journalists’ The French Dispatch.

Watch it above.

Partly inspired by The New Yorker magazine, of which the Grand Budapest Hotel has been a collector since he was a teenager, The French Dispatch is set in the fictional French city of Ennui-sur-Blasé in the middle of the last century.

Anderson stalwart Bill Murray plays the Dispatch’s editor Arthur Horowitz Jr, inspired by the New Yorker’s founding editor Harold Ross. Elisabeth Moss, Owen Wilson, Tilda Swinton, Fisher Stevens, and Griffin Dunne all play editorial staff at the magazine.

Anderson’s first live action feature film since the Oscar-winning Grand Budapest Hotel delves into a number of stories published by the fictional magazine, which appear in the trailer to play out partly in black and white. Story #1 is called The Concrete Masterpiece and it centres on Benicio Del Toro’s character, Moses Rosenthaler, an incarcerated artist and his prison guard muse Simone (Léa Seydoux).

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Story #2 is called Revisions to a Manifesto, a story that revolves around Timothée Chalamet’s and Lyna Khoudri’s student revolutionares Zeffirelli and Juliette, and journalist Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand).

While Story #3 is called The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner which appears to be about an acclaimed chef played by Stephen Park.

According to a report by the real life New Yorker magazine, Adrien Brody plays Julian Cadazio, an art dealer, “modelled on Lord Duveen, who was the subject of a six-part New Yorker Profile by S. N. Behrman, in 1951”, while Jeffrey Wright’s Roebuck Wright is a journalist from the American South who writes about food.

The official synopsis reads: “THE FRENCH DISPATCH is a love letter to journalists set in an outpost of an American newspaper in a fictional 20th-century French city and brings to life a collection of stories published in “The French Dispatch” magazine.”

The first poster for the film was released yesterday. Check it out below.

The French Dispatch comes to UK cinemas on 28 August, 2020.