Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Darjeeling Limited
2007 · Wes Anderson · The Darjeeling Limited on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the brothers sit still while India moves past the window. (camera)
Anderson leased a working Indian Railways train and shot on live track through Rajasthan. The light in the compartments shifts because the sun really is going by, and the country behind the actors is not a plate.
Payoff: They are not traveling so much as being conveyed, which is the joke underneath their whole pilgrimage. In the reading: Movement of world. The reading calls this the movement of world: the character holds still and the world takes over the moving.
Watch the walls sit flat and parallel behind the actors. (camera)
Robert Yeoman frames dead frontal, walls parallel to the sensor, action turning in right angles. The compartments are barely wider than the men inside them and nothing in the frame is accidental.
Payoff: Anderson closes a frame harder than almost anyone, and here that closedness is the subject rather than the manner. In the reading: The closed set (cadre). The reading calls this the closed set: a frame treated as a system where everything present has been chosen.
Count the pieces of monogrammed luggage the brothers drag around. (setting)
Eleven matching cases, plus their father's sunglasses, his razor, his car keys. Everything they carry is either inherited or bought as a souvenir. Peter wears the glasses and nobody says why.
Payoff: The inheritance is literal freight, and the joke about baggage is so obvious the film eventually makes it physical. In the reading: Symbol. The reading calls the luggage a symbol: the single object that condenses the film's whole relation to the dead father.
Listen for music from Indian movies rather than from India. (sound)
There is no original score. Randall Poster sets late-sixties Anglo-American rock beside cues Satyajit Ray wrote for his own films and a number lifted from Merchant Ivory's Bombay Talkie.
Payoff: Even the soundtrack is a mediated inheritance, filtered through cinema exactly like everything else these men brought with them.
Watch Owen Wilson manage his brothers off a laminated schedule. (performance)
Francis hands out itineraries prepared by an assistant and announces when the spiritual part will happen. Wilson plays the mania completely flat, so nobody in the scene ever reacts to it.
Payoff: He has booked his own transformation in advance, which is precisely what the film declines to deliver on time.
Once you have seen it
Watch the long lateral track past the train compartments. (camera)
The camera glides past each box and finds the mother, the ex-girlfriend, the steward, and the businessman from the platform, laid out like a doll's house while The Kinks play.
Payoff: Whatever connects these people is being produced by the camera rather than by them, which is an argument against the characters.
Watch what the brothers do at the river. (structure)
Three boys, one for each brother. They go into the water. They bring two out. The third does not come up alive, and nothing in their scheduled grief has prepared them for that.
Payoff: The old machinery of act and resolve runs at full strength and fails to close, which breaks the comedy open.
Watch the funeral flashback and where it is placed. (structure)
The village funeral will not be absorbed, so the film cuts back a year to New York. Andrew Weisblum sets it in as one isolated block, the only sustained retreat in the picture.
Payoff: The past is kept as a sealed unit these men agreed not to open, and the film's argument comes out of opening it.
Carry this in: Watch the windows. The brothers barely move under their own power, and the country does the moving for them.