September 6, 2007
Bloomberg News

Wes Anderson Goes to India, Polish Family Intrigue: Venice Film

By Iain Millar

Sept. 6 (Bloomberg) -- Two of the best films at the Venice festival share the twin themes of trains and fragmented families.

The one you may have heard about enhances its director's reputation as one of the U.S's most engaging and offbeat talents. The one you probably won't have heard about will, hopefully, give its Polish director a highly deserved breakout hit.

In Wes Anderson's ``The Darjeeling Limited,'' three brothers, Francis (Owen Wilson), Peter (Adrien Brody) and Jack (Jason Schwartzman), who haven't spoken in the year since their father's funeral, take a train journey across India that will make or break their fraternal bonds.

The trip has been organized by eldest brother Francis, a control freak who has his personal assistant make up laminated daily itineraries for their journey, including spiritual visits and rituals that are meant to heal the siblings' fractured family ties. Francis also has his head swathed in bandages after what he says is a motorcycle ``accident.'' (It's no small irony, given Owen Wilson's absence from Venice after health problems.)

Middle brother Peter is also keeping a secret -- imminent fatherhood -- and winds up the others by producing item after item that he says their late father left specifically to him. Jack, the youngest, is on the run from a destructive relationship, writes short stories that are actually descriptions of the real events in his life, and hacks into his ex-girlfriend's answering machine.

Dark and Gentle

The film is a riot of color and music, shot entirely on an actual train in India, and yet again returns to Anderson's favored subject matter -- how young men from favorable backgrounds deal with the failings of their parents. The film is darkly funny, gently moving and momentarily sad; its thematic repetition is forgivable.

``The Darjeeling Limited'' brims with sharp insights into family dynamics, how the brothers are affected by the land in which they are traveling and how they grieve over their dead dad and their runaway mum (a neat cameo from Anjelica Huston).

Andrzej Jakimowski's first feature, ``Squint Your Eyes'' (2002), got rave reviews at film festivals worldwide yet never went on general release outside his native Poland. His latest film, ``Tricks,'' deserves a far wider audience.

In a small Polish town, bored six-year-old Stefek (Damian Ul), whiles away a hot summer hanging around his 18-year-old sister Elka (Ewelina Waldendziak). They try to learn how the old men of the village make their homing pigeons take to the skies, and place model soldiers on railway sleepers to see if they will fall over from the vibrations of the trains that pass over them.

Fateful Game

Stefek and Elka play a game, where they see if they can influence fate by placing small objects in the paths of others: who can get a passer-by to pick up a hamburger in a paper bag left by a bin, for instance. Elka is a skilled practitioner at the game, Stefek a hit-and-miss beginner.

When Stefek thinks he has spotted their estranged father at a railway station, he sets off a chain of small events intended to make him return to their mother and reunite the family. Elka, who is trying to get an office job that will take her away from the kitchens where she washes dishes, at first denies that it is their father, then chastises Stefek for his constant references to him.

The success of ``Tricks'' is entirely due to Jakimowski's delicate directorial balancing act. If it was any slighter, the story could drift away into a series of slow-moving, beautiful scenes in which not much happens and the audience might just drift away. Yet any greater emphasis on Stefek and Elkas's different strategies for dealing with loss would have tipped the balance into mawkishness and sentimentality. Jakimowski, helped by great performances from his two young leads, gets it just right.

Multiple Identities

Elsewhere, there has been a lot of buzz about John August's ``The Nines.'' August is a screenwriter who wrote the scripts for such an unlikely pair of films as ``The Corpse Bride'' and ``Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle,'' among others. He has written and directed this tale of a man who may or may not be inhabiting the real world, taking different personalities and encountering various incarnations of the same people who are trying to give him versions of the same warnings. Clear? Thought not.

Such are the convolutions that lead to the simple resolution, it would be unfair to anyone who might want to see the film to say why exactly ``The Nines'' is such a load of hokum -- it would give too much away. Yet hokum it is. The explanation of why all these things have happened is truly feeble.

If a couple of stoner sophomores tried to write a movie after overdosing on episodes of ``Star Trek'' and ``The Twilight Zone'' it might turn out like -- or perhaps even be better than -- this.

(Iain Millar is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this review: Iain Millar in Venice at id.millar@virgin.net .

Last Updated: September 6, 2007 07:30 EDT