Sunday, 23 March 2014

Let’s make an agreement… ~ Francis

This is a review of The Darjeeling Limited (2007)

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This is a review of The Darjeeling Limited (2007)



Francis’ (Owen Wilson’s) brothers Peter (Adrien Brody) and Jack (Jason Schwartzman) may have some notion as to why they are in India with him, but we just suddenly start the film by seeing Peter run and make a train that businessman Bill Murray misses*, joining Jack and Francis on the gaily painted several carriages that constitute The Darjeeling Limited. One frankly does not care whether up-market independent train operators such as the Bengal Lancer and this one are a reality in India – one buys into it, because of the sheer persuasiveness of Wes Anderson’s directorial / writing vision :

Just as with the poignantly elaborate set of luggage, Anderson is packaging a concept just for the film, and we do not so much as hesitate to legitimize it with our attention and belief. (Likewise, The Grand Budapest and its mountain perch patently do not exist, but that is the whole point : in that film, the wholly deliberate irony is that the Author who, when younger, met an older Zero, who told of Gustave H. and their earlier adventures and fate, is investing with meaning a story about a non-existent place, and we laugh and cry about it even so.)

The feature, however, is – as stipulated – preceded by a short called Hotel Chevalier (2007), which involves Jack, the room in the hotel in which he has ensconced himself for quite a while (elaborately customizing it), an item of that monogrammed luggage, and a call from and the arrival of Natalie Portman as the woman who has hurt him in some way. The encounter is loaded with suppressed energy, yet at the same time seems low key, with questions and quick-fire, almost knee-jerk, answers, as if this is the endgame to a hard-fought game of chess, reduced to its essentials : she says that she will feel bad in the morning, if they have intercourse, and he responds with ‘That’s OK with me !’.

Such feelings, under the surface but maybe not (fully) acknowledged by either party, prepare us for what is to follow. For the trip on which Peter joins Jack and Francis is on the latter’s obsessive terms (who, we later see, gets it all from their mother Patricia (Anjelica Huston)) – assisted by the enigmatic Brendan (Wallace Wolodarsky), who has been engaged to devise, print and even laminate the itinerary as a convenient card, the trip progresses, trying to get spirituality from scheduled stops at this or that holy place.

One is reminded a little, by the trio’s shakes of the head at nothing happening when they have completed some ritual, of the moment, in Beckettt’s Endgame**, when Hamm, Clov and Nagg (three other males), on Hamm's injunction Let us pray to God, adopt 'Attitudes of prayer' : when, afterwards, all three say that nothing took place, Hamm concludes The bastard ! He doesn’t exist***. This ‘reporting back’ is one of the film’s routines, and there is a comic inevitability that this or that procedure hasn’t worked because Peter and / or Jack did not ‘do it properly’.

Through these stipulated activities from Francis, through Jack’s lust, and through Peter embracing danger – as well as from their casual abuse of pain-killers (coincidentally, they also feature throughout Endgame), and even cough liquid (reminiscent of Beijing Punk’s Madame Pearl’s syrup ) – we come to know them all, their inability to keep secrets, their failure to abide by the agreements that Francis procures, and the rebellion that covers mourning, a sense of irredeemable loss.

What does work for them is an event that is entirely off programme, and which sees the trio, going native in Darjeeling Limited pyjamas, where they had not expected to be, but where they are graciously included in what happens. We see them enter into it in slow motion, just as Peter caught the train at the beginning, but this seems fitting, no affectation. The pyjamas are what they offer as the best that they have to fit in, and that is how they come to relate to where they are, rather than continuing to expect the spiritual to come to order.



Anderson has achieved a rare and lovely thing with this film : not the over-reverential approach of the British in A Passage to India (1984), where India seems so ‘other’ that it is always going to remain at a distance, and not the mixture of the worst of what is almost frivolity and of predictability in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011) (such as a hotel not as expected****, run by the stereotypical entrepreneurial dreamer without substance, and where racism can be charmed away by generosity and hospitality).



Instead, Darjeeling gives us an immaculately structured work (including the unusual frisson of an apparently separate prelude to the main act), which has been put together and filmed so carefully, with Anderson’s heightened sense of a unity of composition, that it seems to be in the same relation to India, but no less true than, Henri Rousseau’s The Dream (from 1910) to the jungle : our appreciation is heightened by our awareness of the technique behind the art. Plus, of course, the three strong central performances (all of them are Anderson regulars), in which Brody probably has the edge for presence, but Wilson has done some of his best work, and (with Roman Coppola) Schwartzman also co-wrote the script.




End-notes

* A paradigm for life ? How often do we say I missed the boat on that one ?

** Faber & Faber, London, 1964, pp. 37–38.

*** An utterance censored by order of The Lord Chamberlain (when there was such an office), and required to be something more tame.

**** According to IMDb, the British visitors are ‘retirees’, which logically implies that another person (‘the retiror / retirer’) has retired them, not that they retired.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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