Hotel Chevalier

Hotel Chevalier (2007) is a thirteen minute short set in a single hotel room. Jack Whitman has been living in a Paris hotel for months. His former girlfriend arrives without warning. What passes between them is not a reconciliation; it is two people continuing to hurt each other. It is the prologue to The Darjeeling Limited. The events take place two weeks before the feature, and Jack later recounts this conversation to his brothers as though quoting from a short story he wrote. The production circumstances were unusual. Wes Anderson financed it himself and described it as being like making a student film. It was shot in Panavision with a crew of fifteen at the Hôtel Raphael on Avenue Kléber in Paris over two and a half days, with a week of editing. Jason Schwartzman and Natalie Portman appeared for free. It went up on iTunes as a free download on 26 September 2007 and stayed there for a month, in which time it was downloaded more than 500,000 times. It was then withdrawn and shown in cinemas ahead of the feature. The yellow of the room, Peter Sarstedt's Where Do You Go To (My Lovely) and the near single take cutting are what people remember of it. It runs 13 minutes. Good for: Wes Anderson, the short form, and completing The Darjeeling Limited. Less good for: watched alone it has no context and the characters' history goes unexplained. There is nudity. Do not expect emotional resolution in thirteen minutes; the film deliberately leaves it open.