The Darjeeling Limited

Wes Anderson wrote the script with Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman and shot in Rajasthan, mostly around Jodhpur and Udaipur. The train is not a set. The production took ten carriages and a locomotive from the North Western Railway, gutted and rebuilt them to Mark Friedberg’s design as a working studio; local craftsmen hand painted the elephants outside. It ran on live track, so the landscape past the windows is real and the schedule had to bend around real train traffic. Nearly everything you hear was lifted ready made from other films: music Satyajit Ray wrote for Teen Kanya and Charulata, cues from the Merchant Ivory pictures Bombay Talkie and The Householder, three Kinks songs. In front of the feature stands the 13 minute Hotel Chevalier, with Natalie Portman. After Venice it went out free on iTunes for a month, then played before the feature in cinemas. Its last exchange returns inside the story Jack reads to his brothers at the close; skip it and that ending loses its hinge. A good fit if you start with Hotel Chevalier and expect the weight in what the brothers are not telling each other, not in the landscape. Not for you if you want India given a story of its own; it is largely the brothers’ backdrop here.