Wes Anderson's India

Asian American pundits emitted a collective groan upon hearing the premise of Wes Anderson's latest film, The Darjeeling Limited: three white brothers travel to India on a spiritual journey to discover the fabric that ties them together as a family. Cue the sitars!

Much of Asian American film criticism has settled into a predictable form of knee-jerk defensiveness. Hollywood + white men + Asian women = sexist neo-imperialism. Hollywood + Asian men + Kung Fu = orientalism. Third world country + female suffering + Oscar = self-satisfying Western neo-liberalism. While there's much truth in the basis of these formulas, there's a danger that they've become so standardized as to have dulled their critical edge.

To be sure, there's a time and place for this form of criticism. The annual Memoirs of a Geisha-type drama for instance, is the perfect occasion upon which we should deploy our crudest critical weapons. But critics (not just Asian American ones) also need to realize that criticism must first and foremost engage with the films, filmmakers, and audiences to understand the emotional and aesthetic nuances that so easily get ignored when the usual critical formulas are laid on top of films, as if the same interpretive grids could be placed over every work of art. And indeed, even the most gratuitously racist productions (Memoirs of a Geisha, Lost in Translation, even Balls of Fury) are in their own ways, works of art that create pleasure through subtle (and not so subtle) uses of sound and image. Before we critique them, we need to take them on their own terms, and that means understanding where their pleasure comes from.

Despite what one may think of the quality or nuance of his art, Wes Anderson is without a doubt an artist. His decorative formal compositions remind me of filmmakers like Jean Renoir, Ingmar Bergman, Powell/Pressburger, and others. Meanwhile, his images are rocketed to another dimension by his awesome use of popular songs; in this category his only peers are Martin Scorsese and Wong Kar-wai. Finally, he's found a cinematic style -- not just composition and music, but also editing, camera movement, slow motion, and acting -- that fits his peculiar and easily-identifiable brand of quirky humor.

Having now seen the film, I'm happy to report that The Darjeeling Limited is indeed funny, beautiful, and to some extent moving. If The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou saw Anderson growing ever-more show-offy, The Darjeeling Limited sees the maverick director a little more withdrawn from splashing his signature pastel blues and pinks or filling the screen with a hodge-podge of 19th and 20th century toys and trinkets. Part of it is the use of outdoor locations, but part of it is the more serious subject matter. This is Anderson's most sincerely serious film to date; it's not as smug as The Royal Tenenbaums, or as crazed as Rushmore. That said, it lacks the comic and narrative creativity of those two films, though it is surely more interesting than The Life Aquatic. For better or worse, The Darjeeling Limited also gains considerable emotional power from the recent extra-cinematic events surrounding star Owen Wilson, whose real-life wounds surround his character with every wrap of bandaging on his character's battered head.

So where does India fit in? I have a few quick things to say about the basic premise of the film: yes, it is a story about white guys "finding themselves" in an exotic environment. And yes, the film falls into some of the trappings associated with the premise. But there's craft involved, and as with all of his films, looking closer at the smugly high-brow artifice, one finds an artful sediment of deep sadness and conflict. I've only seen the film once so far, so I can only provide a few notes on Wes Anderson's India:

Picture and composition

Anderson's most famous aesthetic device is his use of space and the arrangement of things within it. Think of the opening credits of The Royal Tenenbaums, and the placement of the library book and the inkpad, followed by the symmetric placement of candles around an invitation. Or the tightly framed long shot of characters boarding a ship at the end of The Life Aquatic. If visual sexiness in most American films relies on flesh and fire, the attractions in Anderson's films are geometric and puzzle-like.

Anderson makes no attempt to combine traditional South Asian pictorial composition with his own. There's no need, for innovative graphic artists The Singh Twins have done a similar thing already. Instead, Wes Anderson, with the help of brother Eric Anderson, simply incorporates Indian iconography into his own easily-identifiable aesthetic. Pictures of elephants in a sky-blue background are placed prominently on the train at the center of the film; they reminded me immediately of the blue wallpaper in The Royal Tenenbaums. The scenes in Indian temples are exotic, but not of the exotic Other as in The Last Emperor or The Last Samurai, but of the exotic world of a child's imagination. The low angle tracking shot of the temple ceilings are the same sort of playful tracking shots we see throughout Anderson's films; it is the view of an innocent child rather than a tourist Westerner. The opening of a curtain in the temple reminds us of the stage curtains in Rushmore and The Life Aquatic; they reveal simple pleasures, not other-worldly oddities.

I'm reminded of early 20th century modernist paintings, where artists with easily identifiable visual styles (such as Braque or Picasso) applied their abstractions across a variety of subjects. Part of their fascination is to see a visual style adapted to fit the spectrum of human experience. Anderson's child-like fascination with shapes and symmetries overlays a specific interpretive logic over his many worlds, be they prep schools, mansions of New England literatis, or submarines. In each case, he lovingly integrates these worlds into his own quirky universe, and you end up with a new affection for each as a result. The pictorial approach to India in The Darjeeling Limited has a similar effect, confidently bringing Indian iconography into the geek-chic geometries and crayon-fine symmetries. At times I even started to subconsciously feel that the Hindi signs in the background were in Anderson's favorite Futura font.

Music

An integral part of the Anderson touch is that he takes these slightly off-center worlds and gives them a touch of nostalgia. He blows off the fairy dust, if you will, revealing enchantments of the past in every setting he enters. Central to each of his films (although less in Bottle Rocket) is the way classic rock, especially British Invasion, so effortlessly does the trick. If the angst of child geniuses and tennis stars is too obscure for the average viewer, a few vaguely familiar Rolling Stones tracks brings it all home.

The music is anachronistic, yes, but what makes them work is that they're of a popular genre that's somewhat exotic, yet at the same time totally modern because they are the rock n' roll to which contemporaries like the Strokes and the White Stripes aspire. In The Darjeeling Limited, Anderson senses a similar appeal to the Indian music heard in the classic films of Satyajit Ray and Merchant-Ivory. Sure, it's coded as "traditional Indian." But the tinny sound quality (as well as the prominent on-screen credit to the original filmmakers) remind us that these are songs extracted from old movies. We listen to them in a similar way we do the old rock songs in this and other Anderson films because they seem like a cool, pop-culture cousin to the somewhat exotic world we're viewing.

But the key songs in The Darjeeling Limited are ultimately British Invasion (in this case, the Kinks); they are the songs that play when the characters transcend their problems, straighten up and fly right (usually in slow motion). It's not that the "Indian" music is not sufficiently transcendent, but rather that Anderson's world has a certain logic, and British Invasion always wins.

The Exotic Girl

Foul #1: If you don't want to anger the Asian American critic, you do not have the white male lead (played by Hollywood star) crave sex with the exotic Asian girl. Nevertheless, it doesn't take long for the Jason Schwartzman character to eye, pursue, then seduce the sexy train attendant, Rita, played by Amara Karan. But there's a tradition of the exotic female in Anderson's films -- and a cruel point as well. I'm referring to the sexy Brit Rosemary Cross, the Olivia Williams character in Rushmore. No doubt much of her allure (again, for the Jason Schwartzman character) in that film was her accent, as well as the sense that she came from a faraway place, away from the dusty pines and creaky cellars of Rushmore. In both films, the Schwartzman character is pathetic and naïve. The obsession with the exotic female is a delusion of escape, and in both cases it is only by seeing what is in front of them (the average American Margaret Yang in Rushmore, the old girlfriend played by Natalie Portman in Darjeeling Limited) that they come to their senses and give up the exotic girl.

The Exotic Guy

Foul #2: when the most prominent speaking role for Asian men in your movie is a waiter. That'd be Rita's jealous boyfriend who works on the train serving guests. But wait. We're in India, but the man has a cleaner Hollywood accent than co-star Owen Wilson. That's because he's played by Waris Ahluwalia: cult hero, fashion designer, and part-time actor. Reared in NYC and made famous in LA, Paris, and Tokyo by his chain of jewelry stores, Ahluwalia is an odd fit for the second most stereotyped Asian role in Hollywood cinema (after martial artist). But then again, Anderson is a poet of the odd, forcing us to look at seafarers, tracksuits, and handjobs in a new light. And the fact that Anderson is prone to re-using his stars makes Ahluwalia (who had a notable role in The Life Aquatic) feel like part of Anderson's gang of players, an average Joe among the exotic oddballs. And for those who are awaiting him: yes, Anderson favorite Kumar Pallana (Pagoda in The Royal Tenenbaums) makes an appearance. He only adds to the fun, as well as the feeling that India is not so exotic, but still within the locus of the Anderson imagination.

Props

White men in Anderson's films tend to be idiots. Childish, arrogant, but adorable idiots. They appear to belong to the upper crust of some bizarre fantasy of America, circa 1850-2050. You have the Tenenbaum clan and the Rushmore prep school. Here, we have the Whitman brothers, who must be rich, white, and spoiled enough to think they can drop everything and travel the world to solve their existential dilemmas. Nothing embodies their social status more than their suitcases: brown, monogrammed leather designed (as the credits loudly remind us) by Marc Jacobs for Louis Vuitton. It's safari gear for the yuppie set. Every Wes Anderson film has at least one fetish object: in The Royal Tenenbaums you have Royal's beloved Javelina, in Rushmore there's the Swiss Army Knife. These are objects with symbolic, sentimental, and comedic value.

Many reviewers have groaned at Anderson's somewhat obvious visual pun: to solve their problems, the brothers must (literally) let go of their baggage. But in light of what their trip (and India) ends up meaning in the film, the pun has a slightly less obvious effect. [Spoiler alert!!! Skip to next paragraph if you must!] When the brothers tire of their adventures praying in temples and saving Indian boys in rivers (the film's least successful use of India, in my opinion), they come to a surprising conclusion. It's not that India has or doesn't have spiritual solutions to their secular woes. It's that they're simply too idiotic to figure them out. The dorky laminated itineraries and printed instructions for prayer lead them nowhere. When they perform their own twisted versions of Indian prayer at the end of the film, they're not mocking Indian religion, they're resigning to the fact that they were stupid enough to have bothered to begin with. Letting go of their baggage is also letting go of the pretensions associated with the safari mentality common in countless Euro-American film and literature.


Again, I've only seen the film once, and perhaps I'm letting my adoration for Wes Anderson's style relax my defenses. But, I'm open to testing my conclusions on a second viewing, or to revising my views after discussing them with other viewers of the film. However, more important to me is my point that Asian-ness in mainstream American cinema should never be critiqued as simply Asian-ness. For the great majority of viewers, cinema is pleasurable not because of the Asians or Asian elements in it, but for any number of other reasons, like: sex, violence, comedy, mystery (in roughly that order). In Anderson's films, they happen to be music, composition, comedy. To critique a film is first to understand its appeal and its artistry, then to decode how race, culture, and other elements become part of the film's rhetoric. To think that there are formulas for criticism is to be deluded that there are always formulas for film art.