You Mean you Don't Know?
Not to beat a dead horse, but I did finally see The Darjeeling Limited this past Friday. Much to my surprise (because I hadn't clicked on or read any of the mini-ads that are popping up all over the NYTimes.com, though now I somehow can't miss them) the Hotel Chevalier short was attached to the feature film in theatres, so now I've seen it three times. I cannot help but ask myself, Why?
Although I preferrred watching Hotel Chevalier in theatres for its higher resolution and saturation of color, I was disappointed by its interplay with the full-length feature. As a short supplement to a richer and more complex storyline, Chevalier could have come off quite well. The details in the brief picture are all in the implications: everything remains unsaid between the two ex-lovers (played by Natalie Portman and Jason Schwartzman), forcing us to imagine why she might have bruises on her arms, why he has run away to gay Paris. Knowing that this 15 minute interlude is a mere prequel, we are ready for the complexity that certainly must be coming to sustain a feature-length film with these characters.
But it never comes. Wes Anderson, for all his cult following (and believe me, I still get a brief thrill up my spine when I think about watching Rushmore for the first time) seems to have faded away into his own self-conscious aesthetic. While the characters in The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic were charmingly oblique, we were at least able to discern the limits of their motivations - their various births and implications. In The Darjeeling Limited, however, Anderson never quite moves beyond the coy characterization of Chevalier. It's up to the audience to decide whether or not the people he sets before them are real, and that's not quite fair.
Those in attendance with me on Friday expressed a similar ambivalence.
"Did you like it?" we asked one another, chewing on our lips in anxiety.
"Um, sort of?" came the inevitable reply.
Perhaps this type of storytelling - implication over explication - is an appropriate method for a generation of people stuck in their twenties, trying to look cool while we flail around for something to do. Indeed, perhaps all of us, desperately seeking respect and engagement from a world which considers us too young to have a family and too inexperienced to have a "career," are meant to see some echo of our own disembodied techno-freak personalities in the wispy, unsatisfying Anderson (and similar - this also seems to be a symptom of a lot of short-story writing these days) protagonists. We have the attention span for as much knowledge as we can get on Wikipedia: perhaps we don't deserve to watch characters who know any more than that about themselves.
It's the new cool in inner life: if you have to ask, you can't afford it.
Or maybe I'm just stressed out about National Novel Writing Month and paranoid about my own artistic output. It's only fair to put that option on the table too!
*** Image credit: http://www.visionarts.ca/photoillusion.htm
It's actually a bit more interesting in this location, because the original website is equipped to play up the optical illusion. Don't you see the moo cow?
Although I preferrred watching Hotel Chevalier in theatres for its higher resolution and saturation of color, I was disappointed by its interplay with the full-length feature. As a short supplement to a richer and more complex storyline, Chevalier could have come off quite well. The details in the brief picture are all in the implications: everything remains unsaid between the two ex-lovers (played by Natalie Portman and Jason Schwartzman), forcing us to imagine why she might have bruises on her arms, why he has run away to gay Paris. Knowing that this 15 minute interlude is a mere prequel, we are ready for the complexity that certainly must be coming to sustain a feature-length film with these characters.
But it never comes. Wes Anderson, for all his cult following (and believe me, I still get a brief thrill up my spine when I think about watching Rushmore for the first time) seems to have faded away into his own self-conscious aesthetic. While the characters in The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic were charmingly oblique, we were at least able to discern the limits of their motivations - their various births and implications. In The Darjeeling Limited, however, Anderson never quite moves beyond the coy characterization of Chevalier. It's up to the audience to decide whether or not the people he sets before them are real, and that's not quite fair.
Those in attendance with me on Friday expressed a similar ambivalence.
"Did you like it?" we asked one another, chewing on our lips in anxiety.
"Um, sort of?" came the inevitable reply.
Perhaps this type of storytelling - implication over explication - is an appropriate method for a generation of people stuck in their twenties, trying to look cool while we flail around for something to do. Indeed, perhaps all of us, desperately seeking respect and engagement from a world which considers us too young to have a family and too inexperienced to have a "career," are meant to see some echo of our own disembodied techno-freak personalities in the wispy, unsatisfying Anderson (and similar - this also seems to be a symptom of a lot of short-story writing these days) protagonists. We have the attention span for as much knowledge as we can get on Wikipedia: perhaps we don't deserve to watch characters who know any more than that about themselves.
It's the new cool in inner life: if you have to ask, you can't afford it.
Or maybe I'm just stressed out about National Novel Writing Month and paranoid about my own artistic output. It's only fair to put that option on the table too!
*** Image credit: http://www.visionarts.ca/photoillusion.htm
It's actually a bit more interesting in this location, because the original website is equipped to play up the optical illusion. Don't you see the moo cow?
Labels: artistic choices, characterization, choices, movies, NaNoWriMo, Natalie Portman, Paris, plot, stories, wes anderson
posted by Adrienne Celt at 7:48 AM
1 Comments:
A thoughtful and articulate critique. I have yet to actually see the movie, but have seen the short several times. I was a huge fan of Wes Anderson after seeing Bottlerocket back in the day, but have had mixed feelings about his more recent work. I am sure that I will still be seeing Darjeeling sometime soon, but I certainly won't be going into it with expectations for an emotionally complex masterpiece. Beautiful, but emotionally impenetrable to the point of emotional vacancy seems to be the theme I suppose.
Post a Comment
<< Home