Category: The Darjeeling Limited

TDL is out in the U.K., and the critical response has been quite good.

Kevin Maher of The Times (London) says:

Yet the devil, as always with Anderson, is in the detail. The way that the older brother Francis orders food for his younger siblings and the unspoken paternal affection between Francis and Jack – when combined with Anderson’s smart use of pop classics and gorgeous slow-motion photography – create something compelling and emotionally satisfying. It may not have you weeping in the aisles, but it will be with you for days after you see it.

This is Hertfordshire’s Steve Pratt asserts that The Darjeeling Limited is an “offbeat comedy… worth a trip.”

IndieLondon has an interview with music supervisor Randall Poster. 

The Film Blog, November 20, 2007

Link

We all know what quirkiness is, but as a film sensibility it’s become something like what ‘screwball’ was to comedy in the 40s.

A cobra in a box, a tiger on the loose, Raj-era Tintin-like stereotypes and Owen Wilson. All these things together in one movie set in India can only mean one thing: Wes Anderson has a new film out. The Darjeeling Limited is business as usual for Anderson: family dysfunction and pristine set design; every scene traced in with whimsical misadventures and poker-faced witticisms (“I love you, but I’m gonna Mace you in the face”), all perfumed with an impeccable eau d’irony.

Atlantic Monthly contributor Michael Hirschorn recently dubbed Anderson’s modus operandi “quirk”, “the ruling sensibility of today’s Generation X indie culture”. It’s not hard to come by these days. In the cinema, Hirschorn cites Napoleon Dynamite, Garden State, Little Miss Sunshine, Everything is Illuminated, Me and You and Everybody We Know, as well as Anderson’s oeuvre. You could certainly add Wristcutters: A Love Story, also out this whttp://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200709/quirkeek, set in an purgatorial afterlife for suicides filled with meandering slackers going on road trips and trading Coupland-esque loops of bombed-out conversation.

We all know what quirkiness is, but as a film sensibility it’s become something like what “screwball” was to comedy in the 40s: a set of rules (and hence moral assumptions) that govern over a fictional world. Atmosphere, surreal observations, pop-culture-filtered flotsam and random encounters take priority. And plot? Generally speaking, the quirk films display a similar attitude to plot as the Gen X gang did to 9-5 employment: something previous generations chased after.

Perhaps the quirky sensibility has its roots in observational, auteur-led cinema of the 70s Raging Bulls brigade, then the 80s American indie scene where the survivors took refuge when Spielberg and Lucas cleaned up. The oddball, antic approach has meandered from strength to strength since. Generation X are probably busy writing their wills, even Generation Y are getting older, and quirk is a firmly established style. The studios might give Jim Jarmusch a job now – even if he’d tell them to stick it. Anderson’s growing profile (in proportion to weakening output) shows that the mainstream gets him, and you can add a raft of other film-makers of similar age doing similar things. Donnie Darko’s Richard Kelly stands out for crimes against conventionality, as well the great MTV triumvirate: Spike Jonze, Mike Mills (remember Keanu Reeves’ New Age-fixated dentist Perry in Thumbsucker?) and, of course, Michel Gondry.

Hirschorn is pretty hard on quirkiness, deeming it “a self-satisfied pose that stands for nothing and doesn’t require you to take creative responsibility”. Maybe because I fall smack-bang in the middle of the demographic that created it and I have a tendency to regard my life as a string of encounters that some unspecified observer (my peers, if I’m feeling particularly desperate) may or may not be taking a dim pleasure in, I find it harder to condemn.

“Post-ironic” as it’s been dubbed, quirkiness definitely has cul-de-sac potential. Anderson is in danger of becoming a cautionary tale. He’s become a repeat (albeit usually enjoyable) performance. Rogue authority figures and families getting by constantly crop up in his films, to be softly wrapped up by the director, but it feels like he’s skirting the conflict that would mean serious drama and emotional sacrifice. It’s no surprise he had to put his new film on rails to generate some forward momentum.

But I think quirkiness has its redeeming value. Post-ironic does sound meaningless, but it’s a make-do tag for a world in which everything has been said, described and subject to representation. Even acknowledging this – irony – has become a devalued tool (one paper reckoned this week the Sex Pistols’ latest reunion had, for want of a better term, gone “beyond irony”).

The quirky sensibility, then, is maybe a gentle strategy to say something new, see things fresh, from an askew angle. There’s a sly lyrical pleasure at work in Wristcutters, for sure. In some respects Gondry shows as many signs as Anderson of being stuck – the lovelorn man-child is a perennial in his films – but his work is so intensely besotted with its own creativity, it seems to take you through a solipsistic wormhole into another universe (see the amazing recreations of Hollywood’s output in his new film Be Kind, Rewind – awesome title, too!).

Then there’s David Lynch. You could call his work quirky, but that would be like calling world war meanspirited. But he’s the leading example of the places you can get to if you let a spirit of waywardness flower

• James MacDowell, “The Quirky New Wave,” Alternative Takes (2005)

From a really fantastic review by Walter Chaw, which I found at the Quiet Bubble:

Anderson has up until now touched on spirituality only obliquely. Here, his disconnected players stop to pray at every altar passed along the way; the loss of a father initiates/necessitates this desperate casting-about for another. Towards the end, there’s a flashback bookended with matching shots that laid me to waste, and in watching the picture a second time, I was stunned by how controlled and economical Anderson is with his images. The film isn’t about the desire to be found, as lesser films might have it–rather, it’s about growing comfortable with being lost. In its way, The Darjeeling Limited is all that needs be said about post-modernism: with the search for God finished, move into an acceptance of aloneness. A character at one point says, “We lost him, and we’re never going to be okay, but it’s the past now–and the past is over. Isn’t it?” There’s an understanding that life is Renoir’s Indian river: it’s never the same twice, and it’s always the same. Anderson handles the shift from deadpan comedy to formalist pathos better than he ever has in the past–The Darjeeling Limited resembles a Takeshi Kitano masterpiece: instantly recognizable, intricate and artificial, and overwhelmingly human. It’s a stunning companion piece to The Royal Tenenbaums (I imagined, more than once, that this is the procession and eulogy for that picture’s patriarch), a distillation of Anderson’s surprising sobriety. If you hear the music, you’ll recognize that beneath Anderson’s hipster veneer is the low keen of loss and wounds that never close. I’m loathe to declare it a better picture than The Royal Tenenbaums (which, with three years to go, remains one of the best pictures of the decade), yet I’m growing comfortable with the idea that if Anderson isn’t the most individualistic, important American filmmaker on the scene, he’s at least that to me.