The Darjeeling Limited English Movie

Oct 8, 2007 By Arun Kumar

It's a Hollywood 'masala' film set in India but with a difference! All the usual Indian ingredients are there in "The Darjeeling Limited" - from a Sikh taxi driver negotiating the chaotic traffic in a small town with cows hogging the road to snakes sold on the roadside in baskets painted with skull and bones. There are camels, tigers, elephant motifs, peacock feathers and an Indian funeral with all its rituals.

But the film rides on a rickety but luxurious train inexplicably named "The Darjeeling Limited" chugging along a narrow gauge track through the stark landscape of Rajasthan.

A sari clad stewardess ready for a sizzling smooch in a toilet at the drop of a cigarette and a stern conductor dressed in maharaja robes and fellow Indian passengers brushing their teeth in the corridor complete the picture.

Only it's supposed to be a fictional train taking three estranged brothers, Francis, Peter and Jack Whitman, on a spiritual journey through India's holy spots in a bid to bring them closer together after the death of their father.

The siblings, always catching slow moving trains on the run, share a huge set of luggage, a legacy of their father, perhaps signifying the emotional baggage they carry as they go in search of a mother who has become a nun somewhere in the Himalayas.

All those designer suitcases and bags with matched, monogrammed set of symbols and "suitcase wildlife drawings" piled onto railways trolleys, buses, donkey carts and other means of transport follow them around faithfully until the very end.

Big brother Francis planned the trip to make them "brothers like we used to be" with compulsive attention to detail. He's also a control freak who wants them all to reach an agreement on matters big or small as long they "say yes to everything" he suggests.

Turns out he is merely copying their mother, who meets them reluctantly after trying to fob them off with the tale of a man-eater tiger roaming the hills, only to disappear again in the dark of the night as they sleep at the monastery.

On another plane it's supposed to be a comedy with dry humour, but to those uninitiated to the ways of Wes Anderson it's no more than a touristy journey exploiting all the clichés about India in a film with little substance.

Irrfan Khan makes a cameo appearance as the father of an Indian child who is killed in a drowning accident despite the valiant efforts of the three to save him. There is an attempt to strike an emotional connect in the child's cremation with the funeral of their own father. But it looks more like a thinly disguised ploy to show yet another stereotype image of India.

Anderson's use of music from the films of Satyajit Ray though pleasant sounds a bit incongruous in a film that uses all his trademark tricks.

It was the opening film at the 45th annual New York Film Festival, but its limited commercial release in North America Friday could well be an acknowledgement that interest in it may be limited to Anderson's die-hard fans.