By Sumita Sheth

Three brothers, toting all kinds of luggage (emotional and tangible), travel across India on a haywire train while trying to resolve their trust issues. Their journey happens to include a minute-by-minute, typed and laminated agenda, a mantra-and-peacock-feather infused ritual to find themselves, and a quest to search for their mother (Anjelica Huston) who “has gone AWOL”! The entire package of The Darjeeling Limited makes for an impeccable premise.

On an unusually warm September day in New York’s Union Square, we met-up with the people behind this uniquely melancholy comedy that opens the 2007 New York Film Festival.

Actor, Owen Wilson, was understandably absent. Journalists were told to avoid discussing the recent event in his life and most of us did.

Director, writer, producer, Wes Anderson, looked smashing in an off-white linen suit. He discussed Satyajit Ray’s movies excitedly and said he found him to be “a good role model.” Incidentally, The Darjeeling Limited uses music from the films of Satyajit Ray and Merchant Ivory. Wes Anderson also threw out the names of a number of his movies, notably Company Limited, as his favorites. Presumably, Satyajit Ray whose early movies Wes Anderson found to be more “mature” in contrast with his later movies, which paradoxically were lighter “adventures”, also affects the tenor of this movie.

“I’d always wanted to make a movie on a train because I like the idea of a moving location,” Wes Anderson is quoted. His crew re-constructed a train that allowed for filming while actually moving on live tracks in India, resulting in “blended Rajasthan-style patterns and the color scheme of Indian Railways with a sort of modern Art Deco style – but all made in the handmade, India tradition,” as per Production Designer, Mark Friedberg.

Regarding shooting in India, Wes Anderson agreed that things were not as controlled as he is usually accused of having them. For example, and this actually happened, if a building was grey when they left it and it had bright flowers painted all over it by the time they came back to shoot, he went with it. India is full of “so many surprises” that you have to roll with what is thrown at you. The entire team stayed in India for three months, shooting the fifteen million dollar movie in about a hundred days.

Wes’ short, Hotel Chevalier, released separately on iTunes (available for free download in the US!), fits as a sort of prequel to the movie but he said was not conceived as such. Thus, it will not be shown in theatres in conjunction with The Darjeeling Limited.

What can one say about this hilarious, unpredictable story? A script by Wes Anderson, Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman, directed by Wes Anderson, can only mean unusual story telling. This group has worked together before and continues to do so, because as actor, writer Jason Schwartzman said, “We three already love each other and trust each other”. There is much kookiness and weirdness and every other entertaining “odd”-ness under the sun in this story. There are obsessed lovers, striking “Francoise Voltaire” suitcases designed by Louis Vuitton, disappearing mothers, eccentrically distrusting brothers, funerals, rescue adventures, girls and nuns with much kohl-rimmed eyes, public toilet trysts, along with an added taste of the exotic thanks to India. And as if in an attempt to top it all off, we have a lost train!? What an awesome basket of …well, basket cases! Fans of Wes Anderson and his “collaborators in life" are sure to lap it all up! Actually, fans will love it as long as they are willing to have their laughs tempered by some seriousness. For when the last reel is done, there isn’t the usual sense of euphoria despite the light-hearted ending. As Roman Coppola put it, this movie is different from the ones they have done before, because “It’s in the DNA”. It could not have been any other way.

When asked whether the lost train was a metaphor that they wrote in or something that actually happened, Jason Schwartzman told us that they had written the part of the train and then they heard of a train that actually had taken the wrong track. “So, shit happens.”

Actor Adrien Brody was austerely handsome in a brown Gucci jacket at the junket. Adrien proved to have a great sense of humor, belying his serious face. He laughed at being called a sex symbol due to his various appearances in only his shorts in the movie, saying, “I can’t call myself that…but you can!” He spoke of seeing the three Whitman brothers, as “fragments of one complete human being that need to be together”. On being new to this team of people who are used to working together, he said he always felt “welcomed” and a part of everything. There were no “inside jokes”.

Actress Amara Khan, who plays the saucy, sexy stewardess on the train, and is one of two female leads in the movie, spoke of the lack of “hierarchy” on the shoot. Being a fledgling star, she was glad they did not have the usual talking to assistants before approaching the bigger stars. They were all “very approachable”.

This movie is shot beautifully, the acting is immaculate and the series of events bizarre yet probable. For a change, even India has been treated differently, exploited for its exotic locales yes, but not depicted as only full of poverty, dirt and disease. Wes Anderson was obviously more interested in shooting it vividly – who can forget the brothers praying together or riding one motorcycle all together, the picturesque empty spaces, the deals to be had on the streets of India, the ease with which super-power drugs can be acquired without a prescription and the state of the nation’s trains?

Any words to temper the positive recommendation for this movie? Well, that depends on whether you walk into the theatre already identifying with one of the characters. If you don’t, then you may be in for some trouble. You will probably watch the scenes and learn each back-story, see it or gather it in snippets, learning of each brother’s personal demons. But this wont guarantee that you feel vested or involved in these people’s lives.

It is possible that the strength of this group - working together, writing, thinking, living together, feeding off each other’s energy and creativity, and life stories - is also their weakness. Their knowing each other too well, may have led to characters who didn’t need any explaining to them but who don’t speak as loudly to the average moviegoer. As Jason Schwartzman said, “We each come from these families…so at some mathematical moment, what’s personal to Roman (Coppola) is personal to me.” But how personal is it to Joe Schmoe who buys the Friday-night movie ticket? Only Joe Schmoe knows!

Images Courtesy Twentieth Century Fox