darjeeling limited

Making a film in India can never be easy," says director Wes Anderson whose newest film, The Darjeeling Limited, was shot mostly in Rajasthan. "Every little place in the country is so fascinating that you feel like making one film after another."

Darjeeling Limited opens the New York Film Festival on September 28, and focuses on three bickering brothers who go on a spiritual journey in India hoping to reconcile with each other.

Anderson, whose hit films include The Royal Tenenbaums, wanted to shoot the film in Darjeeling. "But I hardly saw the sun when I spent a few days there while working on the script," he chuckles. "By then, I had fallen in love with Rajasthan, and that is how we ended up with most of our work shot on a moving train through the state."

The 38-year-old director cast Owen Wilson, Oscar-winner Adrien Brody (The Pianist) and Jason Schwartzman (who also co-wrote the screenplay) as the brothers who have not spoken to each other in a year. Veteran actress Angelica Huston plays a small but pivotal role as the estranged mother of the three men.

London-based newcomer Amara Karan, who among other interesting encounters with the three brothers has a scorching kissing scene, is the steward on the train. And in a very brief appearance, Irrfan Khan appears as the grieving father whose son dies in a drowning accident.

Anderson says by putting the tense brothers, who are suspicious of each other, in a constantly fast moving India, he was able to create a kind of quiet drama he has never created before.

Eschewing the standard practice of shooting the interior scenes of a train on a sound stage in a studio, he opted to shoot them on a hired train. The train itself is one of the big 'characters' in the film. But India is an even bigger character, he says.

"India gets under your skin in no time," Anderson, who fell in love with India when he watched Jean Renoir's The River and practically every film of Satyajit Ray. "I have travelled widely and can't think of any other place that is filled with colours like India. Another amazing thing I found when I visited India by myself four years ago was how people look at you as if you are from another planet. This happens in smaller towns and villages. I feel I am an alien. But soon, I realise I can never be alone in India. Friendships are made in no time."

Owen Wilson plays Francis, the eldest of the three brothers in the film, and is a control freak. Wilson is a close friend of the filmmaker from their college days in Austin, Texas. The actor, who is recovering from a suicide attempt recently, is seen heavily bandaged throughout the film. It is suspected that he had tried to kill himself.

'Francis sees himself as one trying to keep the family together,' he says in the production notes. 'Because our father is dead, our mother is AWOL, Francis is literally damaged. And there is Jack (Schwartzman), coming out of a bad relationship. There is also Peter, who is having trouble with his wife. So Francis has united the brothers on this great spiritual adventure in India, and he has the funny idea they're going to have a spiritual journey -- whether they like it or not.'

But a lot of things go wrong till the three find sudden inspiration to alter their lives. 'For much of the film, the story reminded me of one of those family vacations you had growing up where everything would in a disaster,' Wilson muses.

The second brother Peter (Brodie) is intensely unhappy with his life for a number of reasons including the thought of becoming a father soon. And the youngest brother Jack is a writer who finds plenty of 'inspiration' in the crises in his own family. Like his siblings, he too has a mean streak in him.

Despite visiting a number of temples and shrines, the brothers don't come any closer. But an unexpected incident lands them in the middle of the desert in a small village. Watching a tragedy unfold, and seeing the villagers addressing it with dignity, the brothers start another kind of journey. And this time, it looks like they may learn a few life lessons.

Anderson has said that he always wanted to do a film about three brothers because he is one of three brothers. 'We grew up fighting and yet, they are the closest people in the world to me,' he has said in an interview. 'Of course, all the characters in the movie are fictional.'

As the three watch things happen unexpectedly to them, they learn to approach each other in a different way. "They learn to approach death in a different way too," Anderson says, adding that their minds go back to their father's death and how they had behaved after the funeral.

Anderson, who also got Schwartzman's cousin Roman Coppola to work on the script, talks about how they started plotting the story in the cafes in Paris, and went to India in 2006 to do more writing. They travelled by train and went to dozens of temples looking for plot ideas.

"We did all the things in the movie -- acted the whole movie out together, the three of us," Anderson says though he hastens to add that they did not carry a dead child or buy a deadly snake, or have an affair on the train as shown in the film.

Coppola says Anderson would create a kind of yin and yang through out the shoot. On one hand everything was 'crisply choreographed and designed,' and yet he would stay open to the utterly spontaneous confusion, comedy and chaos. "In the middle of all this, there was always something beautiful," Coppola adds. "The whole spirit behind the movie was to put these difficult, enigmatic and strange characters on the train and then to move fast into chaos, to really roll with the punches, hoping a lot of unexpected happen."

Many of the film's scenes -- including a nerve wracking trip Bill Murray makes at the very beginning of the film in a cab to the train station -- were shot on the crowded streets.

Cinematographer Robert Yeoman, who has photographed all the five films Anderson has made, confesses immediately he has never been challenged more on any film as on The Darjeeling Limited.

'Shooting on the Indian streets is somewhat uncontrollable,' he says in the film's production notes, 'and the sight of a camera always draws huge crowds. Wes likes to carefully place each of his actors in the frame but we often had to deal with the spectators in the background.'

And how did they manage to work quickly? 'We worked often with no lights for day scenes,' he says. 'We also learned how to take the advantage of all this randomness. I hope the film got a particular energy by all the unpredictability.'

To call "The Darjeeling Limited" precious is less a critical judgment than a simple statement of fact, equivalent to saying that the movie is in color, that it's set in India or that it's 91 minutes long. It's synonymous with saying the movie was directed by Wes Anderson. By now ― "The Darjeeling Limited" is his fifth feature film ― Mr. Anderson's methods and preoccupations are as familiar as the arguments for and against them. (See an essay in the current issue of The Atlantic Monthly for the prosecution and a profile in this week's New York magazine for the defense.) His frames are, once again, stuffed with carefully placed curiosities, both human and inanimate; his story wanders from whimsy to melancholy; his taste in music, clothes, cars and accessories remains eccentric and impeccable.


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And like his other recent films, "The Royal Tenenbaums" and "The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou," this new one celebrates a sensibility at once cliquish and inclusive. It reflects the aesthetic obsessions of a tiny coterie that anyone with the price of a ticket is free to join. (Charter members include Owen Wilson, one of the film's three leading men, and his co-star Jason Schwartzman, who wrote the script with Mr. Anderson and Roman Coppola.)



Precious, in any case, is a word with two meanings, which both might apply to "The Darjeeling Limited." This shaggy-dog road trip, in which three semi-estranged brothers travel by rail across India, is unstintingly fussy, vain and self-regarding. But it is also a treasure: an odd, flawed, but nonetheless beautifully handmade object as apt to win affection as to provoke annoyance. You might say that it has sentimental value.



Whether sentimental value can be willed into being and marketed with movie studio money is an interesting question. What is beyond doubt is that Mr. Anderson's main characters and creative collaborators share with him a passion for collecting rare objects and unusual experiences, all of which they handle with exquisite, jealous care.



The fraternal trio in "The Darjeeling Limited" ― Francis, Jack and Peter Whitman ― express, and perhaps construct, their personalities largely through their attachment to things. Francis (Mr. Wilson) has an expensive leather belt, which he tentatively offers as a gift to Peter (Adrien Brody), who cherishes a pair of sunglasses that once belonged to their father. The third brother, Jack (Mr. Schwartzman), is a bit less of a commodity fetishist, though he does have a thing for the savory snacks served on Indian trains (and for the women who serve them).



Francis, Peter and Jack share a huge set of luggage, like those sunglasses a legacy of the father whose death hangs over their journey like a mournful mist. All those grips and valises, piled onto railways cars, buses, donkey carts and other conveyances, can be taken as a metaphor, a kind of visual pun on the emotional baggage these brothers are clearly carrying around. (By the way, this matched, monogrammed set of symbols, we learn in the credits, was designed by Marc Jacobs for Louis Vuitton, with "suitcase wildlife drawings" by Eric Anderson.)



The trip has been planned by Francis, with compulsive attention to detail (perhaps a bit of self-satire on the director's part) and with an explicit therapeutic purpose. He wants them all to bond, to be "brothers like we used to be," to "say yes to everything."



Mostly he expects Peter and Jack to assent to his control-freak instructions, and the friction that arises from their resistance gives "The Darjeeling Limited" its off-kilter comic texture. The movie may be designed within an inch of its life, but there is life in it all the same, an open, relaxed narrative rhythm that cuts against the tight visual arrangements.



Part of the pleasure of watching it comes from never knowing quite what will happen next. Not that everything that happens is pleasant. Wes Anderson's world may be a place of wonder and caprice, but it is also a realm of melancholy and frustration, as if all the cool, exotic bric-a-brac had been amassed to compensate for a persistent feeling of emptiness. The Whitman boys may seem happy-go-lucky, but on closer inspection they don't look very happy at all.



And even when we learn bits and pieces of their history ― their father is dead; their mother (Anjelica Huston) ran off to become a nun; they have been variously disappointed in love and friendship ― the sorrow is never traced to its source. Nor is it ever entirely banished. (Some of that sadness drifts in from beyond the screen; it is hard to look at Mr. Wilson's bruised, bandaged face and weary eyes without being reminded of his recent suicide attempt.)



Mr. Anderson is clumsiest when he tries to confront intense emotion directly. The death of an Indian child, for instance, is less a dramatic crisis than an aesthetic opportunity, a chance for the brothers (and the filmmakers) to explore another aspect of the beauty and mystery of India.



"The Darjeeling Limited" amounts finally to a high-end, high-toned tourist adventure. I don't mean this dismissively; it would be hypocritical of me to deny the delights of luxury travel to faraway lands. And Mr. Anderson's eye for local color ― the red-orange-yellow end of the spectrum in particular ― is meticulous and admiring.



But humanism lies either beyond his grasp or outside the range of his interests. His stated debt to "The River," Jean Renoir's film about Indian village life, and his use of music from the films of Satyajit Ray represent both an earnest tribute to those filmmakers and an admission of his own limitations. They were great directors because they extended the capacity of the art form to comprehend the world that exists. He is an intriguing and amusing director because he tirelessly elaborates on a world of his own making.



It is certainly a world worth visiting, though a short stay may be preferable to an extended sojourn. At the New York Film Festival ― where it will be shown as the opening-night selection this evening ― "The Darjeeling Limited" will be preceded by a short, written and directed by Mr. Anderson, called "Hotel Chevalier."



That film, which visits Jack Whitman (Natalie Portman visits him too) at some point before the events chronicled in the feature, will accompany "Darjeeling" on DVD, but not when it opens in New York theaters tomorrow. It is worth seeking out, not only because it fleshes out part of the story of the Whitman brothers but also because, on its own, it is an almost perfect distillation of Mr. Anderson's vexing and intriguing talents, enigmatic, affecting and wry. "The Darjeeling Limited" is an overstuffed suitcase. "Hotel Chevalier" is a small gem.



"The Darjeeling Limited" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian) for sex, drug use and profanity.


The Darjeeling Limited Directed by Wes Anderson (U.S.)

Take a handful of damaged characters. Put them on a road to some unexpected place, like the Central California wine country or the never-never land of a kiddie beauty pageant. Squeeze for laughs until everybody hurts.



And you might have the sort of movie ― like "Little Miss Sunshine" last year, or "Sideways" two years before ― that has twice brought Fox Searchlight and its allied producers within heartbreak distance of a best-picture Oscar.



If this is finally to be the year for the robust specialty unit that was formed by 20th Century Fox some 13 years ago, "The Darjeeling Limited" is likely to be the film to make it so.



Directed by Wes Anderson and written by Anderson with Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman, the latest happy-sad road trip from Fox Searchlight is set to make its American debut at the New York Film Festival on Sept. 28. It will be released commercially the next day.



"Darjeeling" carries Anderson's distinctive mark: As in his films "The Royal Tenenbaums" and "The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou," familiars like Anjelica Huston and the recently hospitalized Owen Wilson populate a bit of space made personal by its crosshatching of eccentricity and family ties. But it also sticks closely to some conventions ― the road trip, the bittersweet comedy ― that have done well for its studio. This time around the damaged heroes are a trio of brothers played by Schwartzman, Wilson and Adrien Brody. They travel by train through the Indian subcontinent in search of a mother, Huston, who has become a nun. Along the way they inflict a fair amount of pain on one another.


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But the real jolts come from encounters with the alien universe around them, perhaps lending just enough scope to let Fox Searchlight work its magic once again with voters of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.



Peter Rice, the studio's president, declined to be interviewed for this article. Still, some who have worked closely with Fox Searchlight noted that Rice and his team have followed one basic rule with their best picture bets in the past: Let the audience lead.



"They don't try to sell what's not there," said Albert Berger, who with his partner Ron Yerxa was among the producers of "Little Miss Sunshine." The Fox Searchlight method, Berger said, has been to let a picture "explode, if it was going to, into academy consideration."



Ten years ago the company's first best-picture nominee, "The Full Monty," did exactly that. A modest British comedy about unemployed steelworkers doing a striptease act, it had no major stars and was directed by the relatively unknown Peter Cattaneo. But it turned into the art-house equivalent of a blockbuster when it scooped up $46 million at the United States box office during an unusually long eight months in theaters.



Academy voters got on board about halfway through that run, nominating the picture, along with its director, screenplay and music, for Oscars. (Only the last was a winner, as "Titanic" swept the awards that year.)



Something like that pattern repeated itself with "Sideways" and "Little Miss Sunshine," Fox Searchlight's only other best-picture nominees to date. Both of those started as critic- and crowd-pleasers. Both carried what many in Hollywood are beginning to see as the ministudio's trademark bittersweet comic sensibility, a signature that has emerged during Rice's nearly eight-year tenure with the unit, which he took over in early 2000.



"People do matter, as much as those who run big corporations want to think otherwise," said Mark Gill, a producer who was previously at Warner Independent Pictures, referring to the personal mark that Rice and other executives have put on their respective companies.



Miramax, Gill noted, has shown a bent for Anglocentric fare like "The Queen" and "Becoming Jane" under its president, Daniel Battsek. And Sony Pictures Classics, under Michael Barker and Tom Bernard, was long an outpost for foreign-language films, like the 2001 best-picture nominee "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and last year's "Lives of Others," both of which won the Oscar for best foreign-language film.



Fox Searchlight's soft spot for off-center comedy has gotten the studio on tiptoes but never quite kissed come Oscar night: voters may love their beautiful losers, but serious pictures like "Crash" or "The Departed" tend to go home with the prize.



When it comes to awards, however, Anderson has some history on his side. Together with Wilson he was nominated for an Oscar for best original screenplay in 2002, although the prize went to Julian Fellowes for "Gosford Park."