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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.

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