Venice Film Festival 2007 diary part four

Wes Anderson has made a name for himself as a purveyor of smart, postmodern comedies. Dave Calhoun reviews his new film, 'The Darjeeling Limited', from the Venice Film Festival and finds the talented director on good form but very much playing to the gallery

The Wes Anderson international troupe of tragic-comic players – minus Owen Wilson – rolled into Venice on Monday for the world premiere of ‘The Darjeeling Limited’, which Anderson shot last year almost entirely in India. Not only did Anderson make the film in India, but he was often shooting on a moving train, with Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzmann playing three brothers who embark on a journey through the sub-continent a year after their father’s death: they haven’t seen each other since the funeral and they hope that India will bring them closer together as friends and brothers.

It’s a Wes Anderson movie from the off: the sound of The Kinks and the Stones mixed with the music of Satyajit Ray; the marriage of colour, costume and production-design to create a vivid impression of the real world; and, of course, the presence of Wilson and Bill Murray – even if Murray, a veteran of ‘Rushmore’ and ‘The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou’ appears cryptically for only a few minutes as ‘The Businessman’ (probably a reflection of the brothers’ father) and barely utters one word. As ever with Anderson’s work, the comic and the melancholic work together, and while ‘Darjeeling’ is lighter on its feet than ‘The Life Aquatic’ because of its speedy pace and the relative simplicity of its camerawork, still we encounter the familiar sight for a Wes Anderson picture of privileged but troubled young men struggling to find a place for themselves in the shadow of their family.

Before the Venice screening of ‘Darjeeling’, Anderson presented a seventeen-minute short film called ‘Hotel Chevalier’, which he originally conceived to play before the main feature, although there’s now talk that it will only be available to see online come the film’s UK release in November. This wistful and maudlin short story offers some background to the main attraction as Schwartzmann and Natalie Portman play a pair of estranged lovers who square up to each other in the sumptuous surroundings of a Parisian hotel room.

Those fifteen minutes are classic Wes Anderson. His camera moves with grace and precision through the room as Schwartzmann, with a sad look on his face and a stark moustache above his lip, waits for Portman to arrive. Sitting on the floor is a beautiful tanned-leather trunk decorated with colourful images of elephants (one of a set crafted especially for the film by Marc Jacobs). On the stereo we hear Peter Sarstedt’s wistful ode to Paris, ‘Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)', and all around there’s evidence of the same deep orange that characterises Schwartzmann’s hotel dressing-gown, from the thick duvet on the bed to the towels in the bathroom. If there’s one element of ‘Hotel Chevalier’ that’s surprising for Anderson, it’s a strong sense of romance and sexuality: in one shot, Schwartzmann gently pulls off Portman’s clothes to reveal her naked body from behind, and a later shot has Portman, nude, standing still in a doorway, one foot up against the frame. It’s a beautiful shot, and one that’s made even more pertinent by Sarstedt’s melancholic lyrics on the soundtrack. It’s the sexiest thing that Anderson has ever done.

Yet it’s more business-as-usual in ‘The Darjeeling Limited’, where sex and sensuality are barely in evidence among the sibling trio, even if Schwartzmann’s character has a brief explosion of passion with a train hostess (Amara Karan). Mostly, this is a story of men who are apart from women and who are fighting to communicate and find a balance between each other, even if one brother insists on ordering food for the others and can’t bear the idea of lending another his expensive belt. There’s Peter (Brody), whose reticence to admit that his wife is seven-and-a-half months pregnant betrays the fact that he can’t cope with the idea of fatherhood. There’s Jack (Schwartzmann), whose romantic life is in tatters, although he can’t help but use the phone to hack into his ex-girifriend’s answering machine, for which he still has the code. And there’s Francis (Wilson), a wealthy businessman, the instigator of the trip and a control-freak who has a personal assistant travelling in another carriage of the train who delivers laminated schedules under his cabin door every morning. When Francis first appears, his head is swathed in bandages after a serious motorcycle crash back in America; it’s much later that we learn the true cause of his injuries.

There’s much in ‘Darjeeling’ that’s familiar from many road movies: stand-offs, arguments, fights, apologies, shared experiences, lessons learnt and relationships strengthened. We discover more about each of the brothers as we go along, but there’s less of the intricate background and layering of some of Anderson’s other films, particularly ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’, which delighted in the complexity of its biographies. Instead, much is left to the moment and the landscape: Anderson sucks in the sights, colours, oddities and details of India, from the way that tickets are checked on the train to visits to a shoe-shiner and a holy temple. There’s a particularly moving episode involving the funeral of a child that the brothers encounter, which allows for one of Anderson’s trademark slow dolly shots cut to the sound of The Kinks.

As ever, Anderson’s humour is rarely laugh-out-loud, which sometimes feels awkward: the set-up, with three depressed Americans travelling on a train in a foreign country, at least superficially calls for comedy. Instead, the effect of the film is subtle as it invites us to share in the characters’ slow transformation, culminating in a late scene in a monastery, where the boys encounter their mother, played by Anjelica Houston. Structurally, the film isn’t entirely sound, and the emotional depth of both ‘Hotel Chevalier’ and certainly ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’ and ‘Rushmore’ is never quite achieved. But ‘The Darjeeling Limited’ has much charm, is a sensitive piece, is occasionally very funny and further shows Anderson to be a storyteller with a touch for the visually and aurally hip that you imagine he couldn’t shake if he tried.