White tea
The Darjeeling Limited is a funny, beautifully-shot amuse bouche which you’ll forget within days. It’s got little semblance of plot or character development, but style and charm to spare. What some say wrongly of Rushdie is true of Darjeeling: the movie is less about substance than clever pyrotechnics.
In the film, the eldest of three brothers (Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, Jason Schwartzman) summons his siblings to India, hoping sort out their quarrels and move past their father’s death. The characters are flat archetypes, and the script like sketch comedy. But the movie is lushly shot with yellow/orange filters and supersaturated colors. Because director Wes Anderson used his own money on this, the film really moves.
The luscious soundtrack draws from movies like Bombay Talkie. The movie pays homage to Indin film with liberal use of extreme zoom and shots lifted from Satyajit Ray. Amara Karan, who shags Schwartzman in a shaving compartment, is on top in all senses. She does a passable Indian English accent, but her British tones fade in at the end. Waris Ahluwalia plays a commanding member of the train staff in a splendiforous multi-hued pagri. Strangely enough, he plays it with an American accent. His Punjabi is passable. Irrfan Khan has a major part as a grieving villager, but for most of his segment has no lines at all.
Any Hollywood production in India will inevitably grapple with issues of accuracy, exoticism and hipster racism. Despite rumors that he treated his Indian film crew badly, Anderson acquits himself admirably. He films a lengthy kirtan scene in a gurdwara, with all three brothers’ heads covered in shiny polyster hankies. The movie also sets scenes in a Hindu temple and a Christian mission. Muslims are politically absent.
The script winks broadly at stereotypes of Westerners in India: hippie, exoticist white people doing drugs and searching for mystical insight in made-up rituals and peacock feathers while rescuing natives from themselves. India and Indians are a mere backdrop for the central characters, but that’s true of most Anderson flicks.
Anderson’s flashy camera work is very stagy, like the trick sets he used in his latest AT&T ads. He pans a stationary camera rather than using multiple-cam cuts, and uses this for both first-person perspective and comic effect. While you’re looking at one compass point, the other three fill up with odd extras and general flim-flam. Camera swivels, instant quirk; but Anderson shows more wit in a single frame than most do in their entire careers.
At one point in the movie, Wilson peels off his bandages in front of his brothers. Toward the end, he mentions trying to kill himself. This subplot is painful to watch in retrospect, knowing how the actor lacerated himself after production.
Bill Murray, Kumar Pallana and Natalie Portman have cameos. Murray is the McGuffin in a wonderfully-shot French Connection car chase in an Ambassador taxi which launches the movie. He also spiritually connects the movie to Lost in Translation. Pallana is silent as a fellow passenger on the train, inserted sentimentally. Portman shows up half- nangi in ‘Hotel Chevalier,’ a 13-minute short at the beginning which provides backstory for Schwartzman’s grief, but will not be shown with the movie. It’s supposed to be on iTunes, but somewhere along the way my search derailed. I haven’t found myself yet.
 |
|
Wanna see my view of Paris? |
Check out the trailer:
on Wednesday, September 26th, 2007, 6:31 pm in Film, Video clips › 
Email this
› 
Facebook this
› 
Reddit this
› Link
› Reader links
Just interviewed Brody and he actually more insightful things to say about India and filming there.
But Irrfan does speak, Manish.
When receiving his son he addresses the trio, though no one bothered to put up subtitles.
I though the dialogue in the Hotel Chevalier bit is rather pretentious.
You gotta love male-directed film… Jason Schwartzman gets not one, but two, hot girls. As Bugs Bunny said, it is to laugh.
And what price the “foothills of the Himalayas” location?
and boobies!
fuck waris. i’m still the coolest brown dude hanging out at The Beatrice.
-AS
Wait, you already watched it? I thought it doesn’t come out until the 29th? What am I missing?
Dari —– when and where will we be able to read your interview with Brody?
Could you please elaborate upon ‘ hipster racism ‘? You might be on to something here.
Filmi:
Thanks, I’d forgotten.
It was absurd on purpose though.
I can see it. Maybe not on a train unless you’re Ralph Fiennes :)
Bee:
Advance screenings!
Another viewpoint.
I think the Slate guy missed the parody, or refused to buy it. There’s a rescue-the-natives scene; but it is not a straightforward rescue-the-natives scene:
[Ed.: SPOILER]
Just saw the film, then read the Slate article, which hits every nail on the head except part of this:
It’s not the whiteness, it’s the privilege. I come from a much, much less priveleged background than Anderson’s protagonists, and even while his films are entertaining (and Darjeeling Limited is certainly gorgeous too) I’m irritated by the elicitation of sympathy for neurotic rich guys, when I know firsthand what it’s like to be neurotic and poor.
I certainly agree with this:
It would have been a much more interesting movie - and more than the pretty piece of fluff it is - if the Brody character had died and the boy survived. That could have been a compelling story. But it wouldn’t have been a Wes Anderson film.
[SPOILER]
Disagree, I think the wink to The River is clear, especially given how intentionally absurdist the entire movie is.
That ain’t much of a spoiler. But here’s another potential spoiler:
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
[SPOILER ALERT!]
.
.
.
[ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE]
.
.
.
.
SPOILER:
The film has about 5 false endings. Making it seem much longer than it should. Actually knowing that in advance may enhance your enjoyment of it.
I finally saw the movie and the characters were, well, weird. I didn’t mind anything in his potrayal of India, but if I was American I’d be up in arms over the kind of lame doofuses they are shown to be.
I mean, I met lots of Americans in my 3 years here, but none as strange as that. Maybe there’s some super-lame super-rich subculture I have been missing.
It’s the culture of quirk.
quirk for quirk’s sake.
My point was: as you admit, the characters are flat-out archetypes, basically stereotypes, and Anderson does not try to build any kind of sympathy or insight into them. So I guess unless you are one of Anderson’s chosen ones and have some private reason for sympathizing with the characters, you can’t care for them at all, and the movie makes absolutely no sense.
No, I thought they were very sympathetic. In flashback you see the way their parents treated them and their difficult relationships with their siblings. Along with that you see the self-inflicted wounds, true.
Uh..ok. I guess we’d have to disagree on that. I never got a sense of the characters: I just felt that they were a little too f***ed up for relatively minor childhood trauma (maybe I missed some crucial scene or something).
But thanks for being willing to revisit such an old thread :) .
That’s a staple of the indie/emo scene.
“Stuff White People Like: hating their parents” :)
:D.