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THE DARJEELING LIMITED

The Festival’s Opening Night selection, Wes Anderson’s “The Darjeeling Limited” (Fox Searchlight), has placed the film very much in the spotlight, and has garnered the quirky writer-director Anderson cheers from New York, a mixed review from The New York Times and a derisive one from The Atlantic Monthly.
Like Anderson’s previous five films, it is singular, possessing a whimsical shaggy-dog sensibility along with a most exquisite color palette for this rail travelogue of India. Every frame is crammed with the fascinating collectibles by Anderson, an aficionado of the color-coordinated decorative. It seems pretty but also trivial or, if you will, limited.
Emblematic of the main characters’ parental and emotional baggage during the trip, they port their father’s tan, Louis Vuitton luggage, contemporaneously stenciled with palms and elephants by Marc Jacobs and Anderson’s designer brother, Eric. (I’m sure these cases will soon become collectibles.) Having “carried that weight for so long,” through so many exigencies, they toss their paternal baggage away at the end of the journey, which is not only emblematic, it’s easier than psychoanalysis.
As for those stylish Anderson set-ups, I can still see, in my mind’s eye, a thin blue ribbon of the distant powder blue train of the title (an invention and purchase of the production) as seen from a dusty, yellow hillside. The film, itself, has a distinctly blue, orange and yellow palette. It is absolutely stunning!
The New York Film Festival, in fact, brought Anderson, still slim and youthful-looking at 38, to prominence by selecting his second, indie film, “Rushmore” starring Bill Murray, (who has a cameo at the beginning and end of “Darjeeling”) for its 1998 proceedings.
“The Darjeeling Limited” concerns the escapades of its principal trio, the filthy rich, brattish-but-likeable Whitman brothers, played by Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Jason Schwartzman, three second-tier irritants among today’s young leading men. These estranged, sibling rivals reunite, on the fictional train of the title, in order to tour the marvels of India and, at the end, to visit their mother (Angelica Huston, in a bad grey wig) who has joined a Catholic convent situated in the lower Himalayas. (Though lower, it still requires a long and winding and picturesque stairway to reach her nunnery.)
The Whitman brothers prove both genial and contemptible. When an Indian shoe shine boy steals one of Francis,’ (the Owen Wilson character’s) loafers, (to be replaced, throughout the film, by a pointed Indian sandal, as in “one shoe off, the other shoe on,”) he yells at the departing thief, “Those were $3000 loafers!”
In the prefatory, 13-minute short, “Hotel Chevalier,” which Anderson shot in Paris at his own expense to raise funding for “The Darjeeling Limited,” the youngest Whitman, Jack, played by Jason Schwartzman, with his heavy beard shadow and constant open-mouthed lust for whatever maid he’s near, goes barefoot, as he does throughout both films–even though he wears custom tailored suits in the Indian heat in the feature film. (To go barefoot in India and only complain of the successive baths it required to remove the fastened grime is truly sacrificial of Schwartzman. He might well have stepped on a nail, glass, or holy dung.)
In the short, Jack tells his inexplicably bruised and welted former girlfriend (Natalie Portman) that the cost of his ritzy, Paris, Chevalier suite comes to thousands of Euros a day. Ergo, the Whitman boys are not hurting for disposable income, despite their lack of salaried jobs.
Ultimately, for all the years that Anderson and his screenplay collaborators, Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman, toiled on the screenplay, their Whitman Brothers are merely caricatures. Jack, however, has published a collection of short stories, with a lushly decorative cover. On the Darjeeling Limited, he shows his brothers a story about kissing off his bruised, former girl friend, which he has written on a few sheets of Hotel Chevalier stationery. Perhaps, that amounted to a day’s submission from the film’s writing team, filing from around the globe, to “Darjeeling”’s producer Scott Rudin, but I believe that most writers today print out their prose.
The thoughtless Francis (a premonitorily-bandaged Wilson) endangers the lives of his fellow passengers on the train by bringing a venomous cobra aboard, which, naturally, slithers loose from its wooden box marked ‘poison.’ This prank could be construed as truly despicable, or just a device to get these frat boys thrown off the train.
Of course, the callous lads atone by saving some Indian boys, who topple from a rope bridge into a roaring stream. However, the death of one of these children fails to truly sober up this comedy. The subsequent funeral scene is not only out of place, it just lies there with egg on its’ solemn face. In fact, it is rather like the scene, near the end, in which the brothers attempt to liberate their late father’s Porsche from a German garage in Paris (The Luftwaffe Express, a little Nazi in-joke), which is managed by film director Barbet (“Reversal of Fortune”) Schroeder. This dreary, pointless scene, plus the reunion with Mother Huston, vandalizes the end of the film. “The Darjeeling Limited” derails, screechingly, to the tune of the great St. Tropez pop hit of ’68-’69, “Where Do You Go to My Lovely?,” available for downloading from “The Darjeeling Limited” album with other classic pop tunes.
I belatedly realized this was a three-man Beatles movie manqué–a picaresque adventure like “Magical Mystery Tour.” It simply lacked the Liverpool lads and their swell songs.

THE MAN FROM LONDON

Bela Tarr, 52, is a formidable Hungarian director, currently teaching film at Berlin’s DFFB film school, who makes all manner of portentous and sententious films. “The Man From London” is his unlucky thirteenth.
The late Susan Sontag described the director’s seven-hour “On Satantango” (1990-94) as “Devastating, enthralling for every minute of its seven hours. I’d be glad to see it every year for the rest of my life.”
I am not an endurance freak like Sontag, but I stayed through to the end of “The Man From London,” and for the first hour (it runs 135 minutes), I qvelled at the film’s deep, inky black-and-white luster and its pools of down lighting which were remarkably achieved by Fred Kelemen, the director of photography. I remained rapt, though not a great deal was taking place, except for a murder, seen in long shot, on the pier, beneath the boathouse, manned by a gruff boathouse keeper, Maloin (Miroslav Krobot) who is the film’s furious protagonist.
As the director says in the program notes, “The film’s composition is determined by the monotony of Maloin’s working day.” (Here, here! or “I’ll say”). There is a tussle between two, unidentified men at the pier, over a sample case. When the case is hurled from a ship, it falls open on the pier. The two men struggle and one is thrown into the drink. The onlooking Maloin, with his ever-ready long, hooked baling pole, winds up with a dripping satchel filled with stacks of English hundred-pound notes. And that’s the opening action, which takes a long forty minutes to unfold, and might well have been summarized in about ten.
Although there is much blather about ‘a man from London’ arriving with 55,000 pounds to buy a theater in the grim port town where the film is set, and there is a chap named Brown, locked in Maloin’s seaside shack, whom he variously says he has just fed and/or killed, we never view either act and never see Mr. Brown. (Presumably, Brown is “the man from London,” but I am only guessing.) Maloin, however, returns the loot at film’s end, on demand, to an elderly inspector, who informs us, finally, that he knows Maloin has only killed in self-defense. (If I had seen the action in close-up, I could have made my own determination.)
Although John Simenon endorses the film in the rich, black-and-white program, I should think everything was made a great deal clearer in his father George’s novel of the same title.
The rest is torpor time, as Maloin removes his homely daughter, Harriet, from her job, sweeping up a grocery store, for he objects to seeing her rear end revealed by her too-short, white work smock. In compensation for taking away her occupation, he accompanies Harriet to the port’s local furrier, and buys her, (what appears to be), a rather narrow, weasel stole. The poor girl loves it, but promises her mother to return it the next day, as it is too expensive to keep.
Ah yes, there is the startling fit of passion in which Maloin ferociously thrusts his long, boat-house levers back and forth, and the dazzling scene in which two oldsters, at the usually unfrequented, local bar, cavort: one with a billiard ball on his forehead, the other dancing with a straight-backed chair overhead.
Every shot is held well beyond my endurance level, but they certainly do make an impression. Tarr, however, is no Baltic Beckett. If, however, you can tolerate the film’s score by Milhaly Vig, played on a whiny solo accordion, you are a better man than I. I was finally obliged to stop my ears.

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