Not Coming to a Theater Near You

Hotel Chevalier / USA / 2005

Fully braced by the current Wes Anderson backlash, and with very little expectation for The Darjeeling Limited, I was surprised to find that I kind of loved this. It’s thoroughly Andersonian, but the short format works well for Wes, forcing a certain concision in the dialogue, while packing the frame with the usual tchotchkes. But the use of detail here is almost self-critical, as Schwartzman’s monotone character seems to be cosseting himself in knick-knacks — little toys and statuettes, music boxes, a well-chosen song on his iPod, some furtive attempts at watercolor — as he holes up in an overpriced luxury suite in the titular Paris hotel. Everything about the film echoes Anderson’s previous work, but the excess of style here is a good deal more muted, even quite dark. Marc Jacobs’ elegant grey and black costumes contrast with the luminosity of the yellow hotel room just as the yellow lights of Paris contrast with the city’s grey buildings. And there is a somberness and sobriety in the terse dialogue that Schwartzman shares with the cropped, unusually moxieful Natalie Portman that is interesting, too: it retains Anderson’s usual cutesiness tinged with melancholy, but there is an unexpected shade of darkness here, and I’m surprised to say that their relationship rings quite true (and, unfortunately, familiar). Portman looks cute and pixie-ish and acts butch and forthright (the toothpick detail is wonderful), and Schwartzman is his usual frustrated manchild. But his juvenile and spiteful retorts to Portman’s direct address of emotional hurt don’t feel so witty as they might have in Rushmore. On the contrary, they sound pathetic, defensive, like everything else about his character. It amounts to a degree of self-awareness that I no longer expected from Anderson, and it makes this short work quite satisfying. Not that it has dramatically raised my expectations for Darjeeling.

And for the onanistic among us: Natalie Portman is naked and quite stunning.

by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Free iTunes Download
28 Sep 2007 12:52 PM | Comments (1)

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1. Evan / 30 September 2007 / 9:33 AM

   Based on this log entry, I think you might be pleasantly surprised by “Darjeeling,” since I think it shares a lot of the same self-awareness and darkness. Though it also throws wealth, ethnicity and colonialism into the mix of unsavory elements.

   But I don’t want to raise your lowered expectations too high either, in case you start experiencing a backlash-backlash-backlash. So: it sucks.