Hotel Chevalier (2007)

User Rating:

7.2/10   

Director:

Wes Anderson

Writer:

Wes Anderson (written by)

Release Date:

26 October 2007 (USA)

Genre:

Short | Drama | Music | Romance

Plot:

A short prologue of one heartbreaking history of love and the prologue of the travel told in _Darjeeling Limited, The (2007)_ .

Plot Keywords:

Prologue | View | Depression | Bath | Bed

Cast

Jason Schwartzman	...	Jack Whitman
Natalie Portman	...	Jack's Girlfriend
Michael Castejon	...	Waiter

Also Known As:

Part 1 of 'The Darjeeling Limited' (USA) (subtitle)

MPAA:

Rated R for some language and sexual content.

Runtime:

13 min

Country:

USA | France

Language:

English | French

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Sound Mix:

Dolby Digital

Certification:

USA:R | Singapore:NC-16 | Ireland:15A | Sweden:11 | South Korea:15

Filming Locations:

Hotel Raphaël, Paris, France

Company:

Fox Searchlight Pictures

Trivia:

According to director Wes Anderson, the movie was filmed in two and a half days. The film was also edited entirely on his personal computer.

Quotes:

Ex-girlfriend: Whatever happens in the end, I don't wanna lose you as my friend.
Jack: I promise, I will never be your friend. No matter what. Ever.

Movie Connections:

Features Stalag 17 (1953)

Soundtrack:

Ravel: Pavane pour une infante défunte - for Piano

like a quick little short story, as Anderson puts it, the emotional subtleties make it work so well

Hotel Chevalier is the kind of thing Wes Anderson could've written in his sleep- or for that matter written in his sleep while on the plane from the US to France to shoot in two days and edit on his computer. But in such a quick burst of minor creativity he has created a stark, amusing and tragic little situation that makes clearer (if not totally clear) the disconnect between Jack (Schwartzmann's character from Darjeeling Limited) and the 'ex-girlfriend' (Portman, with her V for Vendetta cut coming back in and her attitude like that of a pure b***ch). At first Jack has no idea she's coming, by the long pauses they have (albeit he asks why she pauses so long, when he paused longer), and orders a grilled cheese sandwich. She arrives. She brushes her teeth. She decides against going into a bath Jack's specially prepared- as in Darjeeling we see the obsessive-control side to the Whitman family via the IPOD machine playing the song- and instead they go into a very 'French' kind of torturous love scene.

It's erotic in what isn't shown; one might expect this to finally be *the* one, for skin-flick fans anyway, where Portman goes nude. She does, by the way, but tastefully in the Anderson sense- we're not getting the wacky nudity of the girl from Life Aquatic who never has a shirt on, or the lesbian girlfriend of Paltrow in that one shot in Tenenbaums. By the end, it doesn't make any grand statement about love or love in a hotel room or Paris, but in a self-contained way Anderson's created a mini-masterwork of emotional frustration in the midst of crazy lust. And, by a stroke of something of a quasi-in-joke, like one of the 'brilliant' short stories that the character Jack writes that are 'fictional' though never really at the same time.