The Darjeeling Limited.

After "Hotel Chevalier", we researched further into the short film and the next week we watched "The Darjeeling Limited", the film leading on from HC.

It follows the story of three brothers; Peter, Francis and Jack and their journey to find their mother to find out why she didn't attend their father's funeral. It ends up becoming a spiritual journey for all three of them unexpectedly and we discover how each character is dislocated in his own way.

Peter is expecting a baby back home (But he only told Jack this information) and he didn't tell his wife that he was going on the trip before he left. As the story progresses, you can see him worry more and stress about what will happen when he comes home.

Francis has bandages on his head for a majority of the film and we come to understand that he was in a motorcycle accident. He later on says the accident happened on purpose which made me believe that he was trying to kill himself. 

Jack (who was the character that appeared in Hotel Chevalier) is obsessing over his ex-girlfriend (who also appeared in HC) and to try and take away this pain, he sleeps with the stewardess on the train.

The characters are very dislocated within themselves, they think they know what they want but when they look at each other, they can see that no-one knows what they want or how to fix it. They go to India in search of their mother who they have always been very distant from, and they simply think they are going to jump on a train and see her, but like every film, things aren't as simple as you plan them. The film comes with twists and turns, and with each twist, the characters start to question what they are doing with their lives.

(to be updated)

Hotel Chevalier.

In class, we watched "Hotel Chevalier" and "The Darjeeling Limited", both written and directed by Wes Anderson.

Starting off with "Hotel Chevalier", this is a short film shown before "The Darjeeling Limited" as a lead in to the film. As someone who didn't know either of these characters, I feel like it was very dislocated from the beginning. Wes Anderson is known for being very arty and in my opinion, he used this to push the art and not focus so much on the story. If you didn't do research into the film afterwards, you may be confused about what the relationship between the two characters is. You can take the film two ways:

• You can take it as a slow short film to start off with but then becomes very rushed that brings two characters together that have been very disconnected and by the end of the film, they will always end up regretting sleeping together.
• You can see the art of the two characters being divided by their feelings for each other, you sit and try and figure out their relationship and are unsure where they both stand with their feelings towards each other.

I drew two theories (before further research):

• They are two best friends who sleep together on a regular basis but they always seem to regret it the next morning.
• They had been in a relationship before and are currently off/on and both don't know what's going on between them but they have sex anyway and hope their feelings work out.

Wes Anderson is also known for using a lot of yellow throughout his films and "Hotel Chevalier" is no exception. Even from the screenshot above, there is a large amount of yellow on screen and this adds to 'the arty factor' I spoke about earlier.

Once you watch "The Darjeeling Limited" you come to find out that the woman had in fact been Jack's girlfriend and they weren't together anymore.

I think it's the perfect example of 'dislocation' and I'm glad we got shown this piece of film. I wouldn't necessarily say I loved it but I watched it about three or four times and thoroughly enjoyed it. I liked the mystery of what their relationship was and as I done more research each time, some of the lines they were saying to each other made more sense each time and all started to make sense once I found out that they had, in fact, been in a relationship before.