Wes Anderson by Ian Nathan

Author:Ian Nathan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: White Lion Publishing
Published: 2020-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Anderson directs the first dinner scene on the Darjeeling Limited – the train, hired from an Indian railway company, would effectively become a moving studio.

Shooting on location in Rajasthan, Anderson and his actors embraced the vibrancy of India, though the careful composition of the film’s shots was never abandoned.

Despite the prestige of opening the New York Film Festival in September 2007, The Darjeeling Limited ended up ghettoized as a quirky, arthouse title, gaining little interest from the major awards ceremonies (this would be a prevailing problem for Anderson until The Grand Budapest Hotel). It was his smallest release since Bottle Rocket, leading to his smallest return since his first film: a disappointing $12 million. The studio’s release jitters were perhaps a hangover from the extravagances of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

Reviews were respectful, but qualified. As with his previous film, what some critics once saw as distinctive was now disparaged as indulgent. What did this all add up to? It appeared that Anderson was in a Zissou-Whitman-like slump.

Like his previous adventure, this is a better film than its initial failure implies. Arguably, in fact, it is one of his finest. ‘It has not only held up but gotten richer,’ asserted Richard Brody in Anderson’s favourite periodical, The New Yorker: ‘Each viewing yields fresh wonders. Anderson’s work resonates with the tension between artifice and nature; in The Darjeeling Limited, which was shot on location in India, often in places that defied directorial control, that tension is particularly fruitful.’20

This particular infusion of artifice with the real world resulted in a new, looser variation of the director’s made-to-measure style. The emotions are more accessible; the metaphors more decipherable. ‘There’s a startling new maturity in Darjeeling, a compassion for the larger world,’21 noticed Lisa Schwartzbaum in Entertainment Weekly. But with no loss of what fans (who took it straight to their hearts) loved about his films: that offbeat sensibility, that intricate design, those softly spoken themes.

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