Passage to more than India*

03 February 2009

Passage to more than India*

In this season of Slumdog, the cinetrix recently revisited the wicked West's last objectionable exercise in Indio-philia, The Darjeeling Limited. Of the former, the always smart Dennis Lim observes in Slate

If Slumdog has struck a chord, and it certainly seems to have done so in the West, it is not because the film is some newfangled post-globalization hybrid but precisely because there is nothing new about it.... A slippery and self-conscious concoction, Slumdog has it both ways. It makes a show of being anchored in a real-world social context, then asks to be read as a fantasy. It ladles on brutality only to dispel it with frivolity.

Anderson's film dispenses with any pretense of a more than nodding acquaintance with the so-called real world in favor in photographing yet another cross-sectioned cutaway diorama of boys behaving badly. Which is fine. As his pastiche soundtrack of Satyajit Ray and Merchant Ivory signals, he's interested in an earlier iteration of "India" than the transnational site of call centers Danny Boyle sets to Sri Lankan M.I.A.'s songs.

But even a miniaturist like Anderson cannot entirely exorcise the specter of globalization. [No, I'm not talking about the laminator that unseen assistant Brendan lugs with him.] In the Darjeeling making-of doc that details the loving care with which local artisans crafted every covetable element of the mise-en-scene, witness what lurks in the rail yards, in the off-screen, off-camera space the Whitman brothers traverse in glorious slo-mo tracking shots without ever truly seeing.

Holy fuckin' Schivelbusch! SHIPPING CONTAINERS!