In The French Dispatch, all of the stories are from Ennui-sur-Blasé, France. One of them is by Roebuck Wright. “The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner” relates Wright’s dinner at the Police Station, prepared by the legendary police chef Lt. Nescaffier.
The journalists in The French Dispatch are part of their stories, although they may not intend to be. The undertone of the four stories in the film is sadness and loss; the occasion of the movie itself is the funeral of Arthur Howitzer, the publisher of The Dispatch. He left instructions that upon his death, the magazine should be destroyed to the extent that it could never be recreated. The presses are melted down. The subscribers are reimbursed for upcoming issues they will never receive.
Ennui-sur-Blasé, France, will survive; we see that from Herbsaint Sazerac’s bicycle travelogue. He juxtaposes the past and present of the city, which hasn’t changed all that much, and you can see its future extending from there. But the writers are all “seeking something missing, missing something left behind.” They are all expatriots, as was Howitzer, as is Lt. Nescaffier.
The expatriot journalists feel a loss and a melancholy regret they can’t quite place, in spite of their writing gifts. It’s a melancholy and a regret that Americans will feel, if they don’t already, for the republic we tried to have, until we ruined it — slowly for the past few decades, then this year all at once. In our coming days we will find ourselves “seeking something missing, missing something left behind.”
