The power of the unsaid: Hotel Chevalier by Wes Anderson

In a hotel room in Paris, France, a mustached American expatriate wearing a yellow robe sits on a bed staring at his muted TV. Holding a newspaper in one hand and a phone in the other, he orders his lunch for the day in broken French, hangs up, but then the phone rings.

“Hello?” he says in a monotone voice.

“Hi . . .” a woman says, faint and distant. “I’m on my way from the airport but the front desk won’t give me your room number. What’s your room number?”

There’s a long pause.

Jason Schwartzman’s character recognizes the voice. So full of mixed emotions, he does not know what to say to her. We see the pain and resistance in his eyes, and without the slightest explanation of the long history these two characters had undergone we nevertheless feel it.

Eventually he forces himself to answer: “403.”

“See you in a half an hour,” she says. “Wait a second.”
“What?”
“Where are you?”
“I’m here.”
“I didn’t say you could come here.”
“Can I come there?”
“OK.”
“I’ll see you in a half an hour.”

The expat hangs up the phone and jumps out of the bed.

He goes to the bathroom, pours soap in the bathtub and leaves the water running for a bubble bath. After he steps before the mirror, we watch as he stares into it for a beat and then closes his eyes and opens them again. Without any words said, we see a man with great longing and understand that this mysterious woman (played by Natalie Portman) more than likely is the reason for his staying at this hotel. She is more than likely the reason for his melancholy. And yet, there he is letting her come to see him, so powerless he is and so powerful we already sense that she is.

Wine glasses are left half-empty. Trays of room service food rests unfinished on tables while towels and robes are draped over chairs beside stacks of books. As viewers we are given a sense that this character has been a hotel guest for a long while. The story of these two characters are being revealed to us, and not from being told this or that happened but through the subtle exposition of the room and how uncanny Wes Anderson is at preparing a set and glittering his little contextual clues about the space.

As the character cleans his room, Wes Anderson keeps us engaged in observation by his keen sense of aesthetics. A camera pans across the room. We see a theme of yellow robes against a yellow and white-striped bedspread and little golden lamps set against a quaint French hotel room. And as the solitary man continues cleaning we are given an indirect sense that he is putting order to his life, and that he is confronting, yet again, the source of his disorder.

Jason Schwartzman adjusts a frame holding a preserved butterfly on a coffee table. He removes a statue of a man’s face from his briefcase and puts it delicately on display beside several drawings and a small painting we are to assume are his belongings. Once this conflicted man is dressed in a suit and ready, he leans over his iPod and hits the play button, playing: “Where do you go to my lovely,” by Peter Sarstedt. The lyrics follow an accordion intro — altogether romantic and melancholic — whose words depict a similar man brooding about a woman running off and how he goes on suffering in confusion from a painful distance. The story is all opening up before our eyes and our ears. It’s the story of a relationship that we will never fully understand, just as the two characters will probably never fully understand. And yet, with the many indirect hints of exposition through the hotel room and the song we can nevertheless try to piece it all together. As long as we watch attentively and sensitively.

Still, as the character waits, the usual grey of a cloudy Paris sky is gleaming softly behind him in his hotel room. But then there’s a knocking on the door. It’s her.

Before opening, he leans over his iPod again and hits play as a Natalie Portman with short hair enters, leaving the most wounded and weak man powerless before her.

This is the opening to Hotel Chevalier, considered as Part I of Darjeeling Limited (2007), Wes Anderson’s fifth film. Although Darjeeling Limited could have been a successful film without this masterpiece of a prologue giving backstory to one of the main characters of the feature film, we are gifted with a brilliant example of how, similar to literature, we can understand the complexity of a character’s inner-world through circumstance, which only informs us for the course of the film to follow.

Wes Anderson’s film within a film called Hotel Chevalier is only 13 minutes long. If one counted the lines of dialogue between Jason Schwartzman and Natlie Portman, one might only count a total of 20 or 30 words. Because of this, we are left with the most brilliant example of how little of dialogue is needed when the set, the expository cues and details all add up to give the most subtle yet full understanding of the true drama that is at play between a couple struggling to make things work no matter how destructive their relationship.

In only a few minutes, Hotel Chevalier manages to get to the heart of many passionately destructive relationships that never seem to end. The kinds of relationships where one or both lovers keep hanging on and in the end do more harm than good. Emotionally, it seems, this prologue puts us into the headspace as to why one of the character’s agrees to go off to India as is the story of Darjeeling Limited. To a journey of self discovery, alongside his two brothers, played by the brilliant Owen Wilson and Adrian Brody.

If you have not seen this moving film it is now streaming on Star. But make sure you first watch Hotel Chevalier below. And remember, when watching do not forget the power of the unsaid in drama. Sometimes words and dialogue just get in the way from raw feeling, especially when so much is pinned up between two people that nothing really can be said.

Watch “Hotel Chevalier,” by Wes Anderson