The Darjeeling Limited

[MacGuffin]

The Darjeeling Limited
Source: Entertainment Weekly

Several years ago, Wes Anderson ran an idea by his Rushmore star, Jason Schwartzman. ''Wes said, 'How about a movie with three brothers on a train?''' Schwartzman recalls. ''I was like, 'Uh, yeah, it sounds great!' And he said, 'Just think about it.' I didn't think it was an invitation to help him write it.''

Turned out it was. Anderson, who scripted Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums with Owen Wilson and The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou with Noah Baumbach, collaborated on this one with Schwartzman and the actor's cousin Roman Coppola (CQ). Over the course of two and a half years, meeting in various locales around the world to write, the three friends crafted a tale about a trio of estranged siblings — played by Schwartzman, Wilson, and Anderson-repertory newcomer Adrien Brody — who, after the death of their father, undertake a ''spiritual journey'' on a train through India. ''The movie's about how you can be in a beautiful place,'' says Schwartzman, ''and someone you love can push your buttons, and you're like, 'I can't believe this is happening! Not here, not now!'''

Anderson got the idea to set the movie in India from Martin Scorsese, who years ago showed him a print of The River, Jean Renoir's 1951 film about the subcontinent. ''Seeing that was the moment that made me think I really needed to do this,'' says the director, who also credits the films of Satyajit Ray for inspiration. ''I owe a debt [to Scorsese], definitely.'' Even though the production — based in Rajasthan on the country's northwest coast — used a real train, and the movie is packed with the director's usual eyepopping attention to meticulous and funny detail, Wilson emphasizes that it's about brothers not a wacky train ride through India. ''Sometimes people focus on the eccentric stuff in Wes' films,'' says Wilson, ''and the other stuff gets lost, that there's a real emotion in his work. It's definitely there in this one.'' All aboard. (Opens limited Sept. 29; goes wide in October)

[MacGuffin]

Exclusive Featurette: The Slithery Star Of 'Darjeeling Limited'
Source: MTV

Alright, the clip below may seem a little random. It involves a snake but more importantly it involves Wes Anderson's "The Darjeeling Limited." And for that reason alone I'm interested.

Here's how Wes himself wanted to introduce the exclusive clip you'll watch below:

"We originally wanted to cast a little, red, spectacularly posoinous species called a Krait for the snake in our story, but unfortunately the only one we had actually seen (which had been captured by the manager of a tea estate in Darjeeling) had just been re-released into the wild. The most readily available snakes in Rajasthan seem to be cobras."


http://moviesblog.mtv.com/2007/08/22/exclusive-the-slithery-star-of-darjeeling-limited/

[Ravi]

http://theplaylist.blogspot.com/2007/07/wes-anderson-and-satyajit-ray.html

7/30/2007
Wes Anderson And The Satyajit Ray Connection

Ever since Wes Anderson's "The Darjeeling Limited" trailer was released online there's obviously been a lot of chatter about the film. One uniformed blog naively speculated that the credits that indicated the use of music from the films of Satyajit Ray and Merchant Ivory might even be a joke on Anderson's part.

Far from it. As we noted earlier last week, Anderson's preoccupation with India goes back as least as far as 2002 when he screened Jean Renoir's India-set film, "The River" with Martin Scorsese (who was instrumental in getting the film re-released on DVD by Criterion). But in fact, Anderson's been a long-time admirer of the venerable Indian master Ray and dedicated the 'Darjeeling' movie to him.

"[Ray's] work has been an enormous influence on ["The Darjeeling Limited"]... He was my inspiration for coming to India in the first place," Anderson said in a January 28, 2007 with a local Rajasthan paper, the Statesman. "He is the reason I came here, but his films have also inspired all my other movies in different ways, and I feel I should dedicate the movie to him."

While North Americans are often fond of the Bollywood pumped out of Mumbai with rather prodigious aplomb, Anderson admitted he's not very familiar with the genre and again Ray, was his window to India."My main knowledge of Indian films is Ray's films, which I learned about from renting "Teen Kanya"(Three Daughters) on Betamax in my video store in Houston, Texas, when I was about 15. I also love Jean Renoir's film "The River," which was made by a French director, but is a very beautiful Indian film," he said. "Ray's films, along with "The River" and Louis Malle's documentaries, were essentially all I knew about India before coming here. I became somewhat obsessed with the India I learned about from those films."

Wes was pretty much hooked on Ray ever since and a quick scan of 'Life Aquatic' interviews shows that Wes was already thinking of shooting something in India by the time 'Aquatic' was complete.

"Ray is one of my favourites," Anderson said. "His films (which were usually adapted by him from books) feel like novels to me. He draws you very close to his characters, and his stories are almost always about people going through a major internal transition. My favourites are the Calcutta trilogy of "The Adversary" ("Pratidwandi"), "Company Limited" ("Seemabaddha"), and "The Middleman" ("Jana Aranya"), which are very adventurous and inventive stylistically, and "Days and Nights in the Forest" ("Aranyer Din Ratri"), which I relate to the kind of movies and books that completely captured my attention when I was a teenager, with soulful troublemakers as heroes. I think "Charulata" ("The Lonely Wife") is one of his most beautiful films, and also "Teen Kanya" (especially "The Postmaster") and the Apu films."

Those trying to speculate what Anderson might use musically (and there have been many), need only look at the posters' obvious "featuring music from the films of" Satyajit Ray and Merchant Ivory" credit.

As we noted a few weeks ago, this could likely mean the use of Ravi Shankar (who scored Ray's Apu Trilogy) and Ustad Vilayat Khan (another Sitar maestro) who scored many of the early Merchant Ivory films set in India (while their films are generally known for their reserved British dramas, Ismail Merchant was born in Bombay and didn't leave India for the United States until he was 22. Little known fact: Merchant Ivory were not only film producers for over 40 years, they were lifelong "partners." Merchant passed in 2005.)

But almost certainly, we should expect the music of Satyajit Ray himself. After 1961's aforementioned "Teen Kanya," the director became frustrated with outside musicians and began composing much of his own music for his films.

Anderson loves the aforementioned 1964 Ray film, "Charulata" (aka The Lonely Wife") so much, that he appropriated the movie's Ray-composed song, "Charu Theme" for the beginning of "The Darjeeling Limited" trailer (the song that appears before the Lola Vs. Powerman... Kinks tracks).

So the use of songs composed by polymathematic Ray are a strong bet, though at the time, even Anderson was having a hard time tracking down all the originals scores he wanted.

"I listened to Ray's scores continuously during [the film's writing] process, and I have selected numerous cues that I think are perfect for my story. I would love to hear more however, I would love to listen to the soundtrack from "Kanchenjungha" " he told the Statesman. "I would like to fill the movie with Ray's music, and in some places I have ideas to sculpt the scenes around the music rather than vice-versa. I would like to use the Ray scores exactly as I would use an original score written for my own film."

[tpfkabi]

the soundtrack listing can be found here (i won't post for spoiler reasons)

http://www.rushmoreacademy.com/index.php/2007/08/23/darjeeling-limited-soundtrack-news/

[MacGuffin]

Production Day #6:

http://video.aol.com/video/movies-the-darjeeling-limited-behind-the-scenes-clip-no-2/1962450

[hedwig]

the soundtrack listing can be found here (i won't post for spoiler reasons)

http://www.rushmoreacademy.com/index.php/2007/08/23/darjeeling-limited-soundtrack-news/

it ends on a Journey song.

[I Love a Magician]

the soundtrack listing can be found here (i won't post for spoiler reasons)

http://www.rushmoreacademy.com/index.php/2007/08/23/darjeeling-limited-soundtrack-news/

it ends on a Journey song.

(i won't post for spoiler reasons)

[modage]

the soundtrack listing can be found here (i won't post for spoiler reasons)

http://www.rushmoreacademy.com/index.php/2007/08/23/darjeeling-limited-soundtrack-news/

it ends on a Journey song.

(i won't post for spoiler reasons)

word scramble.

[I Love a Magician]

god damn you jokin sons of bitches

[tpfkabi]

i know now that this is the actual film song list, not the listing for the CD soundtrack.

rushmore academy has a press kit.

[w/o horse]

The Hammer Museum's next Big Time is Oct 4 and it's the Darjeeling Limited.

I requested the day off of work.

[MacGuffin]

Owen Wilson, Alive and Ill On-Screen
By RICHARD CORLISS; Time Magazine

*SPOILER WARNING - READ AT OWN RISK*

It's a shock, but not a surprise, to see Owen Wilson in The Darjeeling Limited, the new semi-comedy from Wes Anderson that had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival last night. As Francis, the eldest of the three Whitman brothers, he's clearly in physical distress. His head is wrapped in two thick bandages, one horizontal, one vertical, as if to keep his brains from seeping out. The nose Wilson's fans know to be charmingly broken has a Band Aid on it. His right hand and wrist are taped, and he uses a cane to walk.

He looks a mess — funny, in the context of the film; not so, given Wilson's hospitalization a week ago for what was described as a slashed-wrist suicide attempt. The actor was released Saturday and is in his Santa Monica home, People.com reported, under 24-hour watch by friends and family, instead of on the red carpet in Venice.

In the movie, Francis is a man on a quest: to reconnect with his brothers Peter (Adrian Brody) and Jack (Jason Schwartzman). They've met in India, on a long train trip, for what Francis hopes will be a three-way spiritual quest. "I want us to be completely open," he tells Peter and Jack, "and say yes to everything, even if it's shocking and painful." OK, then, Peter has an open question for Francis:? "What happened to your face?"

He had an accident, Francis replies, and banged himself up pretty severely. Of his surgeons, he says, "They did all the procedures right, the result of which is I'm still alive." He admits he has "some healing to do," to which Jack cheerleadingly says, "Gettin' there, though," and Peter offers the compliment, "Gives you character." Later Francis reveals that the incident was not quite an accident: "I smashed into a hill on purpose on my motorcycle."

This — along with the fact than Wilson is one of three brothers (Andrew and Luke are in movies too) — concludes the witness report on the coincidences between Francis Whitman and Owen Wilson. Enough already. I feel creepy just passing this information along, as if a critic were auditioning to be a coroner.

Yet, sad as the news is about Wilson's medical condition, what registers most strongly in Darjeeling is his sweet deadpan charm. What's amusing about all his bandages, which make his head as turbaned as that of the Sikh fellow who runs the train the brothers are on, is now how he wears them but how he ignores them; it's as if Francis is having a bad hair day everyone notices but him. Speaking in an intense whisper, Wilson unleashes all kinds of crackpot or domineering suggestions that somehow make momentary sense. He's what actors have to be: salesmen of dreams, carriers of seductive toxins. Wilson always makes the improbable plausible.

But I fear Darjeeling, which opens the New York Film Festival Sept. 28 and will play in major cities shortly thereafter, is beyond even Wilson's powers of persuasion. It's basically the story of three well-heeled guys on one of those self-help vacations that upper-class searchers took in the 60s. Go to India and get your life validated by the Maharishi. Or get good drugs at fire-sale prices. This could have ended up as a Midnight Express nightmare, except that the Whitman boys' luck is a little better, a little weirder. One of them finds romance with a train hostess (lovely Amara Karan). Two of them save local children from drowning. They meet up with their mother (Anjelica Huston) — the source, we soon realize, of some of the boys' bad habits. ?

Picaresque movies often feel longer than they are. For them to work, they need an interior spring with more thrust than Darjeeling's attempt at reconstituted brotherhood. The problem is in Anderson's approach, which is so super-cool, it's chilly. In his elaborate visual construct, virtually every shot is followed by with the camera point-of-view shifted 90 or 180 degrees — which is geometrically groovy, no question, but pretty quickly predictable. Same goes for his stories, which rely on gifted people behaving goofily. Anderson has the attitude for comedy, but not the aptitude. His films are museum artifacts of what someone thought could be funny. They're airless. Movies under glass.

Wilson has appeared in all five of Anderson's feature films (Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou and the new one) and co-wrote the first three — the ones I prefer in the the director's oeuvre. The script here is by Anderson, Schwartzman and Roman Coppola (Francis' son, Sofia's brother) and it doesn't add luster to anyone's reputation.

The Darjeeling program includes a related 13-min. film, Hotel Chevalier. Schwartzman's Jack seems uneasy when he gets a call from an ex-girlfriend (Natalie Portman) who insists on showing up in his swank hotel room. He draws a bubble bath for her. They flirt and parry and wind up in bed, exchanging dialogue that we hear again, at the end of Darjeeling, as part of a story Jack has written. It's a beguiling vignette that, as Closer and My Blueberry Nights did, shows Portman as a comic actress in fresh bloom. I wish that she, and some of the feeling and wit of the short film, had been in the long one.

Actually, there's a bit in Darjeeling — it lasts just a minute or so — that shows what Anderson is capable of. The camera tracks down a corridor of train compartments; in each is a different character, glimpsed for just a few seconds. The Sikh trainman, the hostess, Peter's wife, Jack's Paris assignation...and Bill Murray, as a businessman seen briefly at the film's opening. It's a gracefully composed series of snapshots into the lives of Darjeeling's subsidiary characters, and it made me yearn to dip more fully into their stories. I wanted to be in their movies more than in the one about the Whitman brothers.

Maybe Anderson could make a film, at least a short, about each of these characters. It'd be fine by me if his collaborator on the screenplays was Owen Wilson. It could be therapeutic for all of us.

[MacGuffin]

Review: The Darjeeling Limited
Bottom Line: A train ride without laughs or charm.
By Ray Bennett; Hollywood Reporter

VENICE, Italy-- The whimsical and insightful charm that Wes Anderson and his filmmaking pals have displayed in such films as "Rushmore" and "The Royal Tenenbaums" curdles ruinously in the Indian sun that shines so brightly in their smug and self-satisfied new film "The Darjeeling Limited."

Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman star as brothers on what is supposedly a spiritual journey to the sub-continent. Their father has been dead for a year and their mother (a cameo from Anjelica Huston), who has found religion in the sub-continent, discourages a visit and warns of a man-eating tiger in the vicinity, although it is never seen.

The eldest brother, Francis (Wilson) has planned a detailed itinerary, however, that will allow them to see their mother and on the way hit all the key Indian sources of spiritual renewal on brief railway stops aboard the titular train. If it's Rajasthan, it must be enlightenment.

What ensues is like a third-rate Hope and Crosby picture with no big laughs and nothing to say as the completely self-involved threesome ride the rails in a circle back to their dull and uninteresting lives.

"The Darjeeling Limited" will need all the help it can get to find audiences beyond the stars' committed fans.

The pretensions surrounding this production begin with a 13-minute short film titled "Hotel Chavalier" that was screened ahead of the main feature at the Venice International Film Festival. It will be shown at other festivals and on the Internet, and be included on the eventual DVD, but it will not play in theaters when the picture is released.

Set in a hotel in Paris, the short film shows a brief encounter between the youngest brother, Jack (Schwartzman) and his on-and-off girlfriend (Natalie Portman). It has no significance though except as a platform for the great 1960s anthem "Where Do You Go to My Lovely?" by Peter Sarstedt.

The feature begins with middle brother Peter (Brody) catching the train at the last minute and joining his siblings in their first-class carriage. Childhood rivalries and irksome personality ticks immediately surface, although they all agree on the need for cigarettes and the best of India's over-the-counter medications.

The Darjeeling Limited is a train especially mocked up for the film, a hybrid of the old U.S. 20th Century Limited and the Orient Express with regional patterns and colors, and not remotely like the air-conditioned models of modern India. The boys jump off and on quite a bit and run up small hills trying to communicate with ancient spirits.

While Francis and Peter needle each other, Jack has sex with the train's attractive Indian stewardess (Amara Karan), no doubt because Schwartzman had a hand in the screenplay. They visit bazaars and temples, and in one excruciating sequence are involved in an incident on a swift-moving river in which a little boy is killed.

They stay for the funeral but appear oddly unmarked by the experience, being keen to get on with their search for mom. Huston shows up late in the picture as a kind of nun to explain why she didn't go to their father's funeral, the circumstances of which are revealed in a stilted flashback.

There's an interesting soundtrack with lots of excerpts from the scores to films by Satyajit Ray and Merchant Ivory along with some Kinks and Rolling Stones tracks. The colors are beautiful and well captured by cinematographer Robert Yeoman.

But when current affairs are in such a parlous state, it's almost unforgivable to make a film about stupid American men traveling abroad with not the slightest awareness of or reference to anything that's going on in the world. The film is overly pleased with itself and the characters are way too self-absorbed. There's never a man-eating tiger around when you need one.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Review The Darjeeling Limited
By ALISSA SIMON; Variety

Three estranged brothers bond and get rid of some literal and figurative baggage during a trip across India in Wes Anderson's colorful and kinetic seriocomedy "The Darjeeling Limited." Breaking no new ground thematically, pic comes closer to "The Royal Tenenbaums" than "The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou," but without achieving the poignance of "Rushmore." Inventively staged pic should satisfy the upscale, youth and cult auds Anderson has developed, though it's unlikely to draw significantly better than his earlier work. Following its Venice and New York fest bows, Fox Searchlight item will go into limited U.S. release on Sept. 29.

India's vibrant landscapes and varied modes of travel, in particular the confined space of the locomotive, prove extremely congenial to Anderson's brand of visual humor and widescreen setups. Framing, choreography and physical comedy reference classic train flicks ranging from "Twentieth Century" and "A Night at the Opera" to "A Hard Day's Night."

After a short prologue that neatly epitomizes India's color and chaos -- and offers a cameo for Anderson regular Bill Murray -- pic settles into a first-class sleeping cabin aboard the Darjeeling Limited, where the Whitman brothers have gathered. Francis ( frequent Anderson collaborator Owen Wilson), Peter (Adrien Brody) and Jack (co-scripter Jason Schwartzman) haven't spoken since their father's funeral one year earlier.

Clearly, the siblings all have some healing to do. Francis, the eldest, is swathed in mummy-like bandages resulting from a motorcycle accident (an image that could have unintended resonance for auds who have followed Wilson's recent personal crises). Middle child Peter can't come to terms with his wife's pregnancy. And Jack, the youngest, is so obsessed with his ex-girlfriend he continually eavesdrops on her answering machine.

Armed with a supply of Indian pain relievers, the brothers play catch-up and fall into familiar family patterns. Francis tries to impose his itineraries and menu decisions, Peter flaunts their father's possessions and implies he was the favorite child, and Jack tries to avoid their quarreling through a whirlwind affair with comely train stewardess Rita (Amara Karan).

After they're ejected from the train for egregious rule-breaking, Francis reveals an ulterior motive behind the trip: He wants them to visit their mother (Anjelica Huston), who's now a nun in a Himalayan convent, but she seems less than keen to see them. The convent scenes humorously establish the source of Francis' most irritating mannerisms and pave the way for spiritual healing.

Here, as in his two prior outings, Anderson's arch, highly artificial style gets in the way of character and emotional development, rendering pic piquant rather than profound. Despite intense perfs by Wilson and Brody, Francis and Peter come off as not particularly nice. Schwartzman and Huston fare best at humanizing their characters, while newcomer Karan makes a strong impression as the sexy "sweet lime" girl.

Script gets sibling dynamics down pat, with oft-repeated lines accumulating meaning throughout pic.

Tech credits are top-notch, with particular kudos to Mark Friedberg's gorgeous, intricate production design and Robert Yeoman's nimble lensing. A specially designed, numbered luggage set from Louis Vuitton plays a significant role.

Music track effectively sets the mood with selections from Indian film scores alternating with choice rock tunes.

In Venice, pic screened with a nifty 13-minute short, "Hotel Chevalier," identified in the end credits as "Part 1 of 'The Darjeeling Limited.' " Completed in 2005, pic shows Jack and his ex-girlfriend (Natalie Portman) in the titular Parisian hotel.

Short provides a potent prologue that further serves to make Jack the most sympathetic of the brothers and adds resonance to visual motifs that recur in the feature. Per Anderson, "Hotel Chevalier" will not be shown in theaters, but rather on the Internet, at festivals and on DVD.

[Kal]

Nice start... we didnt need to read that or see the film to say that!

[MacGuffin]

Venice Film Festival 2007 diary part four
Wes Anderson has made a name for himself as a purveyor of smart, postmodern comedies. Dave Calhoun reviews his new film, 'The Darjeeling Limited', from the Venice Film Festival and finds the talented director on good form but very much playing to the gallery.
Source: TimeOut London

The Wes Anderson international troupe of tragic-comic players – minus Owen Wilson – rolled into Venice on Monday for the world premiere of 'The Darjeeling Limited', which Anderson shot last year almost entirely in India. Not only did Anderson make the film in India, but he was often shooting on a moving train, with Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzmann playing three brothers who embark on a journey through the sub-continent a year after their father's death: they haven't seen each other since the funeral and they hope that India will bring them closer together as friends and brothers.

It's a Wes Anderson movie from the off: the sound of The Kinks and the Stones mixed with the music of Satyajit Ray; the marriage of colour, costume and production-design to create a vivid impression of the real world; and, of course, the presence of Wilson and Bill Murray – even if Murray, a veteran of 'Rushmore' and 'The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou' appears cryptically for only a few minutes as 'The Businessman' (probably a reflection of the brothers' father) and barely utters one word. As ever with Anderson's work, the comic and the melancholic work together, and while 'Darjeeling' is lighter on its feet than 'The Life Aquatic' because of its speedy pace and the relative simplicity of its camerawork, still we encounter the familiar sight for a Wes Anderson picture of privileged but troubled young men struggling to find a place for themselves in the shadow of their family.

Before the Venice screening of 'Darjeeling', Anderson presented a seventeen-minute short film called 'Hotel Chevalier', which he originally conceived to play before the main feature, although there's now talk that it will only be available to see online come the film's UK release in November. This wistful and maudlin short story offers some background to the main attraction as Schwartzmann and Natalie Portman play a pair of estranged lovers who square up to each other in the sumptuous surroundings of a Parisian hotel room.

Those fifteen minutes are classic Wes Anderson. His camera moves with grace and precision through the room as Schwartzmann, with a sad look on his face and a stark moustache above his lip, waits for Portman to arrive. Sitting on the floor is a beautiful tanned-leather trunk decorated with colourful images of elephants (one of a set crafted especially for the film by Marc Jacobs). On the stereo we hear Peter Sarstedt's wistful ode to Paris, 'Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)', and all around there's evidence of the same deep orange that characterises Schwartzmann's hotel dressing-gown, from the thick duvet on the bed to the towels in the bathroom. If there's one element of 'Hotel Chevalier' that's surprising for Anderson, it's a strong sense of romance and sexuality: in one shot, Schwartzmann gently pulls off Portman's clothes to reveal her naked body from behind, and a later shot has Portman, nude, standing still in a doorway, one foot up against the frame. It's a beautiful shot, and one that's made even more pertinent by Sarstedt's melancholic lyrics on the soundtrack. It's the sexiest thing that Anderson has ever done.

Yet it's more business-as-usual in 'The Darjeeling Limited', where sex and sensuality are barely in evidence among the sibling trio, even if Schwartzmann's character has a brief explosion of passion with a train hostess (Amara Karan). Mostly, this is a story of men who are apart from women and who are fighting to communicate and find a balance between each other, even if one brother insists on ordering food for the others and can't bear the idea of lending another his expensive belt. There's Peter (Brody), whose reticence to admit that his wife is seven-and-a-half months pregnant betrays the fact that he can't cope with the idea of fatherhood. There's Jack (Schwartzmann), whose romantic life is in tatters, although he can't help but use the phone to hack into his ex-girifriend's answering machine, for which he still has the code. And there's Francis (Wilson), a wealthy businessman, the instigator of the trip and a control-freak who has a personal assistant travelling in another carriage of the train who delivers laminated schedules under his cabin door every morning. When Francis first appears, his head is swathed in bandages after a serious motorcycle crash back in America; it's much later that we learn the true cause of his injuries.

There's much in 'Darjeeling' that's familiar from many road movies: stand-offs, arguments, fights, apologies, shared experiences, lessons learnt and relationships strengthened. We discover more about each of the brothers as we go along, but there's less of the intricate background and layering of some of Anderson's other films, particularly 'The Royal Tenenbaums', which delighted in the complexity of its biographies. Instead, much is left to the moment and the landscape: Anderson sucks in the sights, colours, oddities and details of India, from the way that tickets are checked on the train to visits to a shoe-shiner and a holy temple. There's a particularly moving episode involving the funeral of a child that the brothers encounter, which allows for one of Anderson's trademark slow dolly shots cut to the sound of The Kinks.

As ever, Anderson's humour is rarely laugh-out-loud, which sometimes feels awkward: the set-up, with three depressed Americans travelling on a train in a foreign country, at least superficially calls for comedy. Instead, the effect of the film is subtle as it invites us to share in the characters' slow transformation, culminating in a late scene in a monastery, where the boys encounter their mother, played by Anjelica Houston. Structurally, the film isn't entirely sound, and the emotional depth of both 'Hotel Chevalier' and certainly 'The Royal Tenenbaums' and 'Rushmore' is never quite achieved. But 'The Darjeeling Limited' has much charm, is a sensitive piece, is occasionally very funny and further shows Anderson to be a storyteller with a touch for the visually and aurally hip that you imagine he couldn't shake if he tried.