Category: Hotel Chevalier

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Guest Blogger: Derek Hill on The Darjeeling Limited

Derek Hill is the author of the new book Charlie Kaufman and Hollywood’s Merry Band of Pranksters, Fabulists and Dreamers, now available in the U.K. (Amazon | Waterstone’s | Blackwell ) and out soon in the U.S. ( Amazon ). He has agreed to write several pieces for the Academy. This is part 2; Derek has decided to offer the section of the book on TDL in its entirety. Enjoy!

‘Is that symbolic?  We.  Haven’t.  Located.  Us.  Yet!’
– Francis Whitman (Owen Wilson) has his mind blown when he realises that the train he and his brothers have been passengers on is lost.

Anderson has never been averse to addressing mortality head-on in his films, specifically the death of a spouse (Rushmore), parent (The Royal Tenenbaums) or child (The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou).  Although all of his films are ostensibly comedies, there has always been an element of the impermanence of things, of people, that has delicately coaxed an emotional resonance forth from the wackiness.  Not particularly original or groundbreaking, but when one considers the frequently bathetic treatment of death in much of American mainstream cinema, Anderson’s unsentimental and realistic treatment of grief is a commendable aspect and intrusion upon his lucid, intensely fabricated theatricality.  As much as Anderson has become a master of the elaborate multi-layered mise-en-scene, he also astutely understands the moment to drop back, allowing his characters to feel the brunt of their sorrow without excessive ornamentation.  The Darjeeling Limited is as waggish as any of Anderson’s previous work.  But at its core is the black hole of loss, the invisible thread that binds us as profoundly (if not more so) than birth.

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New Yorker: “A Strange, Long Trip”

February 25, 2008, DVD review by Richard Brody (link)

It’s unjust that the Academy didn’t nominate Wes Anderson’s “The Darjeeling Limited” (Fox) in any category, but inexplicable that they didn’t invent a special one for it: Best Luggage. An exquisite set of suitcases, credited to Marc Jacobs for Louis Vuitton, plays a large role in this blissful, loopy comedy of family anguish and sublimated tenderness.

The film’s subject is coming home, and it’s a sign of Anderson’s comic genius that it takes a picaresque jaunt through India by three brothers, estranged since their father’s funeral a year ago, to do so. The domineering Francis (Owen Wilson), who is recovering from a motorcycle accident, has convened the other two—Peter (Adrien Brody), a regular guy in a panic over the impending birth of his first child, and Jack (Jason Schwartzman), a literary romantic trapped in a troubled relationship—for a “spiritual journey,” which he plans down to the minute.

The trip brings odd misadventure, off-kilter romance, and sudden danger, but the real story involves coming to terms with a lifetime of ingrained resentments plus grief of more recent vintage. For Anderson, such troubles are too big to blurt out without bathos and ridicule. Following other Wasp modernists such as Hemingway and Howard Hawks, he relies on high style, sly gestures, and arch pranks to evoke intense emotion with bite and grace. His tight, sketchlike structures bring out the best in his actors, especially Schwartzman (who co-wrote the script with Anderson and Roman Coppola), a Dustin Hoffman for our time, who doles out Zen wisdom with a carnal leer. In Anderson’s world of brothers without sisters, the ribald rituals of male bonding suggest the unfathomable otherness of women—including the trio’s mother (Anjelica Huston), whose life haunts them no less than their father’s death and who turns out to be the real reason for their trip.

Where people prove elusive, material things play an outsized, totemic role. The brothers’ grudges emerge in their wrangling over their father’s relics—glasses, keys, toiletries—but pride of place goes to his luggage. Dark tan, finely tooled, and adorned with a faux-naïf intaglio of wild animals, it follows them around on their journey at great inconvenience, a perfect, literal metaphor for their heavy emotional baggage.

The film begins with a neat dose of backstory: a short preface, featuring Jack holed up in a luxurious Paris hotel before his passage to India, where he receives a surprise visit from the woman he adores (Natalie Portman, chomping a toothpick, her hair cropped martially short). Movingly, stoically, whimsically, Anderson suggests the difficult self-restraint and self-mastery that the most intimate relationships demand. Love, in his book, is tolerance and acceptance—facing up to pain in order to take the pleasure that’s given.

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Hotel Chevalier in Zoetrope All-Story

Francis Ford Coppola’s magazine dedicated to short fiction and one-act plays, Zoetrope All-Story, has published the screenplay for Wes Anderson’s short film Hotel Chevalier in their Winter 2007 edition. You can purchase the issue for $8.00 on the Zoetrope website.

(thanks to Brian)

But where do you go to my lovely
When you’re alone in your bed
Tell me the thoughts that surround you
I want to look inside your head, yes I do

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Darjeeling on DVD…

February 26, 2007 is the tentative release date for The Darjeeling Limited in the United States (as previously reported).

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(thanks to the Criterion Forum)

Sadly, it appears to be a Fox Home Entertainment release, not a Criterion Collection DVD.

Thread: “DVD” at the Yankee Racers forum

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Wes talks shop, and Mr. Fox

Rotten Tomatoes
November 22, 2007
Link

Wes Anderson burst onto the American Indie scene in 1996 with his first feature film Bottle Rocket which also introduced the world to Luke and Owen Wilson. Cementing his reputation as the Godfather of Quirk with films like Rushmore, The Life Aquatic and The Royal Tenenbaums, Anderson returns to screens this year with The Darjeeling Limited, about a trio of brothers who take a train journey through India and discover more about themselves and each other than perhaps they’d ever hoped for. He talks to Rotten Tomatoes.

Where did the idea for the film come from originally?

Wes Anderson: Initially I had two ideas; one that I wanted to make a movie in India and the second one was that I had this idea about a movie with three brothers on a train together. I mixed them together and they became The Darjeeling Limited.

The other main idea I think was that I thought I’d like to write with Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman and I think the movie we wound up making is really the combination of all three of our points of view mixed together.

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The Darjeeling Limited a “beautiful trip” (Scotsman)

Link

“All Aboard the Mystery Train” (select passages)

IF WES Anderson was a shopkeeper he would deal in curiosities, junk and antiques: elephant’s foot hat-stands, dollhouses and model trains, and records, on vinyl, in protective PVC envelopes. In the American sense of the word, he is a thrift-store filmmaker, operating away from the main drag, just out of town, and taking great pleasure in the everyday stuff most people don’t value….

And it is a beautiful trip, pitched somewhere between The Monkees and an early Jim Jarmusch movie, with flickers of silent comedy thrown in. Oddly, amid such conspicuous design, much of the dialogue feels improvised, but the film does meander towards a point: something to do with forgiveness and acceptance, and the unspoken ties of brotherhood. But with Anderson, the point isn’t really the point.

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Bravo, everyone.

Good morning, Wes world. Some links and news…

Wes Anderson will be awarded the Stockholm Film Festival’s Visionary Award next month.

He has made lasting impressions through his unique ways of using scenography and subtle humour in film successes such as “The Royal Tenenbaums” and “Rushmore.” (link)

Bravo, Swedes!
Be sure to check out The Onion’s A/V Club “Random Rules” feature with Jason Schwartzman and Randall Poster. Yankee Racer Loraxaeon explains the concept:

It’s a feature where they have people just hit random on their iPods and tell them what song comes up and explain why they like it, etc. (thread)

Be sure to enter our First Annual Wes Anderson Inspired Halloween Costume Contest… you could win a Darjeeling Limited prize package!

Finally, The Darjeeling Limited opens nationwide this weekend. Hotel Chevalier will be playing as well. I leave you with the words of fellow Yankee Racer slint:

I just got back from seeing it, finally. Interestingly, Hotel Chevalier did play beforehand, and I’m glad it did. Frankly, having seen the film, I can’t imagine why the studio had pulled it originally.

So…I loved the film. It was such a relief, after my experience with TLA. It flowed so much more naturally, and just carried me along, rather than dragging me. I agree with the Bottle Rocket comparisons; it did feel like Francis is a logical extension of Dignan. His laminated itinerary reminded me of Dignan’s spiral notebook with plans for 6 months, 1 year, 10 years, etc. Overall, this film was just a joy to experience. I had a permasmile, and seriously felt giddy a few times. This totally reaffirmed my love of Sir Anderson’s films…. This was a confident and graceful return to the saddle. Bravo. (thread)

Conclusion: Bravo Swedes, Wes Anderson, and slint.

Updates:

Jason Schwartzman appeared on Live 105.3’s “Wild Ass Circus Show,” Houston/Ft Worth (videos).

IMDB has rescinded an earlier report that Natalie Portman was unhappy with her nude scene in Hotel Chevalier:

UPDATE: A U.S. magazine has been forced to apologize to actress Natalie Portman after suggesting she’s far from happy with her performance in short film Hotel Chevalier. Sunday supplement Parade stated Portman was talking about the movie, in which she appears nude, when she commented about an “uncomfortable” scene she shot in a forthcoming essay she wrote for the publication. But the actress’ publicist, Kelly Bush, has pounced on Parade, insisting her client was actually talking about a torture scene in new film Goya’s Ghosts. A statement from the magazine’s publicist reads, “We say that Portman regrets doing a nude scene in the movie Hotel Chevalier. This is wrong. When Portman writes about this in Parade, she does not mention a specific movie title. She tells us she was referring to a torture scene with a body double in Goya’s Ghosts, which was taken out of context and leaked onto the Internet. Portman is very happy with Hotel Chevalier and proud of her work in the film.” In her essay, Portman admits she is still rather upset about agreeing to do something she felt awkward about, writing, “I’m really sorry I didn’t listen to my intuition. From now on, I’m going to trust my gut more.” (link) (thread)

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Wes, Jason, and Roman on another train

All aboard! AP writer Ryan Pearson rode along with Wes, Jason, and Roman on another train ride… this time in California.

asap Story
asap Videos

The Darjeeling Limited goes national, with Hotel Chevalier, this weekend!

And Hotel Chevalier is one of the many mysteries in The Darjeeling Limited, according to USA TODAY.

“Are the three brothers — Francis, Jack and Peter (played by Wilson, Schwartzman and Brody, respectively) — inspired by the film legends Francis Ford Coppola, Jack Nicholson and Peter Bogdanovich?

Close but not quite, Anderson says. Jack is actually named for Schwartzman’s father, not Nicholson. “We named the (Wilson) character after Roman’s father, and Peter … well, I’d like to give that to Peter Bogdanovich because he’s my friend.”

Fox Searchlight Pictures

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First Annual Wes Anderson Inspired Halloween Costume Contest; Monday update

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We are organizing our First Annual Wes Anderson Inspired Halloween Costume Contest. Thanks to our good friends over at Fox Searchlight, we will have some great prize packages, featuring those ever-coveted marketing items from The Darjeeling Limited. We will have more details very soon (including the exact contents of the prize packages). Direct enquiries to halloween@yankeeracers.org. Who will you be? Peter Whitman? Max Fischer? Steve Zissou? Wes Anderson himself? Bob Yeoman? Dart Boy?

Do note that we will have a special “Darjeeling Limited” category. And, please spread the word!

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We are reporting about the addition of Hotel Chevalier to The Darjeeling Limited print and the weekend box office at the Yankee Racers forum.

Also, please check out the big Darjeeling feature at Premiere.com.

Glenn Kenny sits down with Wes, Roman, Jason, Adrien, and Amara.

Finally, the New York Times has an article on Hotel Chevalier:

 Nancy Utley, a chief operating officer of Fox Searchlight, said that her company did not even know about the short until “The Darjeeling Limited” was completed. Even though Fox was aware of the critical acclaim, the company decided not to release it along with the feature. She said Fox decided to remain “flexible” on what to do.

“We thought it would be too challenging to moviegoers to be exposed to the short in theaters right at the beginning of the run,” she said. “We wanted to make sure ‘The Darjeeling Limited’ got established first as a movie.”

With the wider release looming and “Darjeeling Limited” doing small business at the box office (just over $2.5 million so far), it seemed the obvious choice to include the film’s more popular little sibling as a bonus. Fox Searchlight also is hoping the short is Oscar-worthy and plans to promote it as a contender in the best live-action short category.