Hotel Chevalier (2007)

Nice effects though.

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

Wes Anderson released this short film in 2007 as a prelude to his full-length film THE DARJEELING LIMITED, which depicted three brothers trying to reknit frayed ties on a train journey through India. In this short, Jack (Jason Schwartzman), one of the brothers, has been hiding away in a Paris hotel room for months. He is suddenly visited by a former lover (Nathalie Portman), with whom he appears to have had a troubled relationship, and whom he has not seen in a long time. The rekindling of their passion is played out almost in real time in front of the camera.The short is in fact important as back story for the longer film, as Jack's relationship with this girl is alluded to, and objects from the hotel (such as a bathrobe) appear among his luggage in India. However, both the short and THE DARJEELING LIMITED suffer from the same flaw, namely that Wes Anderson had enormous eye for visual detail, but his attempt to depict a human drama comes off as cold and unmoving. Thus here one will enjoy the painstaking design of Jack's hotel room, full of all kinds of delightful bric-à-brac. However, the acting that Anderson brings out of Schwartzman and Portman is hammy and unconvincing.With that visual richness but lame human drama, I cannot really recommend this short to a general audience, but it may be worthwhile for Anderson fans who have come to like his aesthetic from another film of his.

Designed as a semi-independent prelude to "The Darjeeling Limited", "Hotel Chevalier" proves that ten minutes of Wes Anderson's wizardry are worth more than many another big-budget director's feature-length film. It's a study in the pain and the lust only love can bring, as well as a variation of Anderson's trademark motif, control. Where "The Darjeeling Limited" bubbles over with substance abuse, poisonous snakes, restroom romps, brotherly affection and fatal accidents, "Hotel Chevalier" is a quiet and slightly eerie two-character mini drama set in a lavish Merchant-Ivory style suite. The suite's sole resident is a reclusive control-freak writer in a long-distance relationship (Jason Schwartzman). We watch as he half enjoys, half endures a surprise visit by his control-freak girlfriend (Natalie Portman). Is she a woman of flesh and blood, or is she just an imaginary incarnation of the jet-setting girl from "Where do you go to my lovely", the song Peter keeps playing on his portable stereo? There's no knowing what's real and what isn't in Anderson's paper moon world. But the importance of fact and fiction fades as she reclines on the bed and has Peter take off her spike-heeled boots. It's the most emotionally and sexually loaded scene I have seen in a long time, like a 20-second tango. It seems some of Natalie Portman's best work is done in shorts set in Paris. Remember Tom Tykwer's "True"?

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.

Really a beautiful short piece of enticement, with tone and sight and sound and dialogue all letting you know that there's a story here, while only hinting at the many things that story might be. And it captures a particular feel that lets you in on the situation kind of like a good short story in a book does.The way the whole thing looks, and the way the action comes across, are pure Wes Anderson at his best. Deadpan. Melancholy. Hurtfully truthful-feeling.You know they say there used to be shorts before all the movies when you saw 'em in the theatre. Now we get a string of commercials bigger, louder, and stupider than on TV. It would be so cool if more top notch film-makers like these made more stuff like this. Viva Short Film.And Thank You Especially, Miss Portman, for getting behind in your work. Your talent and beauty are in a neck and neck race for first place in many hearts like my own.I'll be there for "Darjeeling Ltd" the day it opens.