All the urban hipsters love Wes Anderson, and I loved him too -- Rushmore was a really great film. But after awhile, the same gimmicks wear a bit thin. The slo-mo sequences with emotive music, the flat line-deliveries resulting somehow in moments that are meant to be poignant. Darjeeling Limited was yes, cutesy as I expected it might be. Two troubled brothers are summoned by their third (and eldest) to join him on a mysterious trip through India for the purposes of brotherly-bonding, soul-seeking, and, most importantly to find their estranged mother who has long ago become a missionary-nun in the foothills of the Himalayas. The first two-thirds of the film this journey proves to be a bumbling disaster with such antics as the train getting lost, and the brother getting kicked off the train. While seeking an alternate mode of transport, they come upon thee young Indian boys (presumably brothers) who are trying to cross the river with a load of supplies, but their raft is overturned. Our three protagonists jump into the river to try to save the young boys, but their efforts are not wholly successful in the wild torrents of the river: Adrian Brody emerges from the river with a dead Indian boy in his arms. From there, the three somehow (finally) connect with each other, and also reconnect with the memory of their father's death. The funeral rituals, because of their foreign-ness, are profound and beautiful to the three. They emerge having come together, having learned something intangible about brotherhood and humanity, even if on a small scale.
Honestly, it is a cute movie and everything, but the more I think about it, the more I feel like it's such a WHITE movie, as in the kind of film only a white person could make. The whole exploration of what the filmmaker and the protagonists find exotic/foreign/fascinating is not without the acknowledgment of objectification -- but for their spiritual epiphany to be triggered at the expense of the life of a young Indian boy, to me was rather cheap and exemplary of the whiteness of the movie. And I'm not even a hardcore PC racism-patroller or anything.
1 comment:
i agree with much... i was pretty underwhelmed by the whole thing- liked the characters but as for the film as a whole, meh.
About the funeral- I saw it differently- I saw the boys finally going through the ritual of burying their dead, as they had missed that opportunity for their dad. So that the whole process of letting the dead go was important- yes the foreigness definitely opened them up but i think it was the dead dad biz that really opened the door...i think these experiences with death in India are oddly common. remind me to tell you about my friend who helped give a man who was ill and stuck in meditation posture the old heave ho into the ganges after wheeling him to a hospital because he could not uncross his legs to be placed in any other vehicle.
That is sort of unrelated though.
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