THE DARJEELING LIMITED (Wes Anderson, 2007)

Wes Anderson’s previous films left me cold, but The Darjeeling Limited is oddly affecting, occasionally hilarious. Written by Anderson, Roman Coppola and co-star Jason Schwartzman, it is about three brothers who travel across India to visit their missionary mother (Anjelica Huston, marvelous) following their father’s funeral. The boys come with a lot of baggage, which they literally lose, in long-shot, as they chase to catch up to and board the train out. All this luggage had belonged to their father.
     The boys do not seem like brothers. Because they don’t trust one another, they are perpetually at odds, often in small ways, but also in at least one outburst of altercation between the two tall ones, which the diminutive one ends with a generous spray of mace. The boys’ mismatched heights are the visual joke contained in several punctuating long-shots that show the boys running in single file.
     Do you recall that electrifying moment in Nashville (1975) when the previously most self-involved character, Tom Frank, is the first to leap to help the shot-down singer? Anderson mines that human potential for surprise—it is the wishfulness of a cynic, either in his case or Robert Altman’s—when his trio of self-involved brothers dive into a rushing river in an attempt to rescue three drowning young boys, also brothers. Peter (Adrien Brody, giving yet another astonishing performance in yet another different role) fails to save his. (Coincidentally, Peter’s wife back home is about to have their son.) The drowned boy’s funeral triggers a flashback of Peter, Francis and Jack detouring en route to their father’s funeral, probably never to arrive.
     Owen Wilson is okay as the oldest brother, Francis, who acts the boss, but Schwartzman, who is bereft of ability, is the film’s principal weakness.

INTIMATE LIGHTING (Ivan Passer, 1965)

Early on, Ivan Passer’s Intimní osvětlení quietly delivers a shocking cut that chides us for the wrong assumption we might have made. The camera is on what we may assume is a teacher rehearsing school children. But these easily distracted, unruly “kids,” the cut to them reveals, are really fully adult members of a provincial orchestra. (The “teacher” is their conductor.) Given that the group is grappling with a piece by Dvořák, we may find in all this musical messiness and confusion a metaphor for Czech spirit, as well as a glimpse of Czech individualism persisting in a Communist grip.      There are quiet shocks, like this cut, throughout the film, and their cumulative effect is a subliminal portrait of a national consciousness or, at least, sensibility.
     Passer’s behavioral comedy revolves around “Bambas,” who lives with wife, young children and parents in a country village. Petr, whose musical career, unlike Bambas’s, took off and now lives in Prague, has come home for a visit. He is scheduled to perform with the orchestra we have already watched rehearse. Bambas and Petr, who is accompanied by his girlfriend, are a competitive pair, but their friendship is attuned to a mutual neediness. Bambas, who is well played by Karel Blažek, who was dying of cancer during the shoot, is steeped in regrets over his own professional failure. His aura of “what-might-have-been” refers politically, as a whisper, to Czechoslovakia—as does his mother’s thick breakfast concoction, for which she coaches patience at their farewell meal. The film closes on this daft moment, a tribute to Czech persistence.
     An earlier “whisper” of this kind: the pharmacist whose arthritis makes playing music a hard effort. Another reference to Czechoslovakia’s hijacking by Communists: Bambas’s mother’s tall tale about having been abducted by a circus. Tormented cats and bloodied chickens contribute to the same symbolical level of references.
     Passer’s film isn’t the masterpiece that its frequent comparison to Jean Renoir’s Une partie de campagne (1936) implies. It is mild and gray, with nothing like the force that Němec or Chytilová can muster. But it engages.
     Pass the eggnog.