Skip to main content

The Darjeeling Limited - film review

A Wes Anderson film. Kind of an indie project.  Smallish budget that earned twice as much at the box office.  So a business success story.

The actual script co-written by Wes and Francis Ford Coppola's son along with Jason Schwartzman an actor, musician himself.

Lead roles by Owen Wilson (who really has a broken nose and highlights that in the movie) along with Jason and Adrien Brody are the protagonist brothers that meet on a train in India in search of their mother who has run away due to a falling apart of sorts.  The journey is part spiritual and part bohemian and forms the basis of this play like film.

The director has gone to great lengths to (with approval) plagiarize background music scores from senior film makers like Ivory Merchant who in turn learned a lot from one Mr. Satyajit Ray, a master film maker from West Bengal in (then British) India.  The making of this film in western India's desert city of Jodhpur required some amazing patience and collaboration with the locals and it is reflected in the narrative arc of the film and the location shoots.

Opening sequence with a one of a kind Bill Murray, playing the role of a harried businessman who rushes on to an Indian train platform only to miss his train is hilarious and tricky bit of photography.

From then on we see the Whitman brothers (as the lead characters are called) scrunched together on this train heading to presumably Darjeeling in the east.  They are seen coming to grips with each other as the train rattles along the track and the three are forced to re imagine their lives in a claustrophobic coupe with the older bro played by Owen Wilson trying to dictate what they ought to be doing each kilometer of the way.

Overall a pretty decent picture if you are bored of watching the same old plots.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

But What If We're Wrong?

I attempted to read this book by author Chuck Klosterman backward to forward but it started hurting my brain so I decided to stop and do it like any other publication in the English language.  Start from page 1 and move to the right. Witty, caustic and thought provoking this is a book you want to read if you believe that the status quo might, just might be wrong. At times bordering on being contrarian about most things around us it tries to zero in on the notion of what makes anything believable and certain in our minds.  The fact that there is a fact itself is ironic.  Something analogous to the idea that you can never predict the future because there is no future. Many books and movies have tried to play on this concept - best that I recollect (I think I am) was 'The Truman Show'.  This book by Klosterman attempts to provoke the reader to at least contemplate that what they think they know may be wrong. He uses examples like concept of gravity, and how it ...

You are important to us

Followed by piano music.   Followed by 'we are experiencing heavier than usual call volume'.  Sounds macabre like bleeding during menstruation or after a ghastly attack with a weapon on a hemophiliac.  Sorry Mrs. Johnson but it appears little Gertrude here has been bleeding heavier than usual what with her night time activities competing with the woodchucks in your neighborhood. Some services even go as far as to pick a random day to say - 'if you were to call us during the Chinese lunar month when the moon is axiomatically hugging the polar star with Jupiter intravenous when call volume is light'.  Well I will be damned.  I thought  I had checked with my astrologer before I placed this well focused call but  I guess this is what you get for listening to a quack. Umph! I am not sure which marketing genius came up with this personal touch concept of informing the caller that you are really a jackass for actually calling the customer serv...

Of Jims and Johns

Here is another essay on the subject of first names. As in birth names. Or names provided to an offspring at birth. While the developed world tends to shy away from the exotic like Refrigerator or Coca Cola for their new production there is a plethora of Jims and Johns and Bobs or Robs. Speaking of which I do not think there is a categoric decision point at the time of birth if a child will be hereafter called as Bob. I mean have not yet met a toddler called Bob or Rob for that matter. At some point though the parental instinct to mouth out multiple syllables runs out and they switch from calling the crawler Robert to simply Robbie to Rob. Now speaking of - it is strange that the name sounds like something you would not want Rob to do - i.e. Rob anyone. Then why call someone that? After all Rob Peter to Pay Paul is not exactly a maxim to live a young life? Is it? Perhaps Peter or Paul might want to have a say in it? Then there is this matter of going to the John. Why degrad...