Watch the first trail­er for Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch

Wes Ander­son has done us the ser­vice of break­ing up the work­week with an ear­ly look at his upcom­ing film, The French Dis­patch, pri­or to a like­ly pre­mière at the Cannes Film Fes­ti­val (which gave his Moon­rise King­dom a friend­ly home in 2012). There’s no time to lose, so let’s dig in:

The film fol­lows the oper­a­tions of the French head­quar­ters of the Lib­er­ty, Kansas Evening Sun, a styl­ish and wit­ty Amer­i­can jour­nal with more than a pass­ing resem­blance to the New York­er. In an arti­cle from that very pub­li­ca­tion yes­ter­day, Ander­son con­fessed to hav­ing been an obses­sive col­lec­tor of back issues since his younger years.

The har­ried edi­tor (Bill Mur­ray) rush­es to com­plete a new issue while tend­ing to the many eccen­tric per­son­al­i­ties in his orbit, from food writer Roe­buck Wright (Jef­frey Wright) to pol­i­tics reporter Lucin­da Kre­mentz (Frances McDor­mand) to tem­pera­men­tal pro­file writer Herb­saint Salz­er­ac (Owen Wil­son). The film jumps back and forth between the uni­verse of their bustling office, and the sto­ries-with­in-the-sto­ry pre­sent­ed by the var­i­ous arti­cles to be includ­ed in their lat­est edition.

In one, a world-renowned art deal­er (Adrien Brody) comes to make pur­chase of a paint­ing cre­at­ed by a death-row pris­on­er. In anoth­er, a stu­dent rev­o­lu­tion­ary (a flop­py-haired, nude, bath-tak­ing Tim­o­th­ée Cha­la­met) finds him­self at the cen­ter of a mas­sive social upheaval. In the third, an expert chef (Stephen Park) caters to the palates of the local police force as a kid­nap­ping case unfolds before their very eyes.

As the whirl­wind trail­er whisks us through those sto­ries and the out­er world con­tain­ing them, it flits between aspect ratios and col­or schemes. One might assume the black-and-white seg­ments would be the reportage with­in the film, but assort­ed char­ac­ters appear in both styles, so it’s dif­fi­cult to say at present.

What’s for cer­tain is that Anderson’s stick­ing with his pet themes and devices this time around. As in The Life Aquat­ic, the film focus­es on a large cre­ative col­lab­o­ra­tion (a ready metaphor for a film set). As in Isle of Dogs, an upris­ing from a fac­tion of polit­i­cal­ly active young peo­ple will play a major role. And as in The Grand Budapest Hotel, the elab­o­rate mul­ti-tier nar­ra­tive will skit­ter across the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry to chart change on an epochal scale.

Ladies and gen­tle­men, start the engines of your charm­ing­ly old-fash­ioned motor­bikes – a major new work from a major artist is almost here.

The French Dis­patch comes to cin­e­mas in the US on 24 July, and then to the UK on 28 August.