30) The Darjeeling Limited

The Darjeeling Limited (2007)

Director: Wes Anderson

Starring: Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, Jason Schwartzman, Anjelica Huston, Natalie Portman, Bill Murray

Kate had to head out early this morning. Saturday is supposed to be a sleep-in morning for me, but by 7:30am I found myself well and truly awake so decided I would use the hour and a half I had up my sleeve before Kate would be home to watch a film. I perused the shelf and found The Darjeeling Limited. A comedy (ish) and a touch under 90mins, it fit the bill.

Three brothers, Francis (Wilson), Peter (Brody) and Jack (Schwartzman), who have not spoken to each other in a year come together in India at the insistence of Francis to take a journey of spiritual enlightenment and to rediscover not only their brotherly relationships but themselves. As they travel across India on a train, the Darjeeling Limited, little do Peter and Jack know that Francis has planned for this trip to culminate with a reunion with their estranged mother (Huston), who they have not spoken to since she failed to turn up at their father's funeral.

Much like Tim Burton, Wes Anderson has his people, an ensemble of actors he likes to work with. Thus the cast of The Darjeeling Limited is mainly made up of people who have worked with Anderson before on one or more projects (Wilson, Schwartzman, Murray and Huston), with Adrien Brody being a bit of a guest star, but he looks as at home as everyone else in the cast.

Anderson has been able to develop a very distinct personal style and tone to his films. While his films are always classed as comedies, they usually explore melancholy themes of broken dreams and shattered lives. Part of the reason for this consistency in theme and tone is that he always involved in the writing of his material. He usually writes in collaboration with someone else. For his first three films (Bottle Rocket, Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums) that collaborator was Owen Wilson. For this film his writing partners were Jason Schwartzman, a long time Anderson favourite, and Roman Coppola, the son of Hollywood legend Francis Ford Coppola and brother of Sophia Coppola.

The Darjeeling Limited was intended as a a film with two parts. When it was originally shown at festivals the film opened with Part 1 is a short film, about 10mins long, called Hotel Chevalier, which acted as a prologue to Part 2 which was the main body of the story, the three brothers on their train journey through India. This film shows an incident, which will be referenced later in Part 2, when Jack's ex-girlfriend (Portman) comes to visit him at a hotel in Paris where he has run away to in order to get away from her after the breakdown of their relationship. This short film was removed for the wider theatrical release of the film, instead made available for free download from the iTunes Store as part of the film's publicity campaign. However it has been restored as a prologue for the DVD release of The Darjeeling Limited. As I said, the events of Hotel Chevalier are referenced later on in The Darjeeling Limited but in and of itself, the short film strikes me as a wee bit pretentious. Not a lot happens and it is not overly amusing or interesting. Rather it just establishes a mood, at least a mood relating to Jason Schwartzman's character, for the second part of the film.

The film was shot on location in India. Anderson and a small crew spent three months in India, shooting on a real train, running on live tracks with it's own engine. They gutted ten carriages to make the sets for the different locations on the train. Shooting on location really serves this film well, giving their journey a feeling of authenticity as well as providing some breathtaking scenery outside the windows as they chug along and for them to stop off and explore.

For those who have a real interest in Wes Anderson's films, this is one of his best. But that is only for those who are devotees of Wes's style. For the rest of us it is not quite as accessible as the more recent Fantastic Mr. Fox which has all the quirks and quips that Anderson films are known for, but is a bit more friendly for the visitor to Wes World.