Vive La France: Hollywood’s ongoing romance with all things French

Wes Anderson’s ‘The French Dispatch’ is just the latest in a long line of Hollywood films about American artists, writers and journalists drawn to France, writes Geoffrey Macnab. But why are US filmmakers such Francophiles, and do their films about France bear any relation to reality?

Lovers on the Seine: Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in ‘Before Sunset’ (Moviestore/Shutterstock)

Ennui-sur-Blasé, the setting for Wes Anderson’s new film The French Dispatch, is actually Paris by another name – but this isn’t the grimy, litter-strewn place that British tourists might encounter when they step off the Eurostar at the Gare du Nord. Instead, it’s another variation on that magical world that Americans always seem to discover when they visit. It’s a city in which romantic opportunity, political turbulence, great art and fine dining go hand in hand.

Anderson’s all-star film, premiering at the Cannes Festival next month, follows the goings-on at the French Dispatch Magazine, a foreign outpost of the Liberty Kansas Evening Sun. This publication, about to put out its final issue, bears a strong resemblance to The New Yorker. We meet the magazine’s eccentric expatriate journalists as they report on politics, the arts – “high and low” – and human interest, however that might be defined. Bill Murray is the editor, Arthur Howitzer Jr. The staff writers include JKL Berensen (Tilda Swinton), the formidable art critic; Herbsaint Sazerac (Owen Wilson), who specialises in stories about colourful low-lives; Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright), who loves to write about food (including police cuisine); and Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand), who reports on the activities of some radical chic young revolutionaries resembling refugees from a late-1960s Jean-Luc Godard film.

The French Dispatch is the latest in a very long line of American movies that offer a loving, super-stylised Stateside view of the Gallic world. American filmmakers like to treat France as their continental playground: Elizabeth Taylor and Van Johnson are star-crossed lovers in The Last Time I Saw Paris, Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris touches on Ernest Hemingway’s youthful experiences in the city as does Alan Rudolph’s The Moderns, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy drink coffee by the Seine in Before Sunset. And there’s more besides, from Gene Kelly’s An American in Paris to Pixar’s Ratatouille via James Ivory’s Le Divorce. The trend reached its nadir in the recent, much derided Netflix series Emily in Paris in which Lily Collins plays a young American marketing executive adrift in a strange new world of cafes, croissants, haute couture, long lunches and afternoon affairs.