When this, my favorite of all festivals, kicks off this Friday night with Darjeeling Limited, Wes Anderson's new film, the colors will be all curry, turmeric, saffron and blues. Set in India, this road movie featuring Jason Schwartzman, Adrian Brody, and the much troubled Owen Wilson (see the tabloids on his attempted suicide), is about losing “baggage.” (Those on film were designed by Marc Jacobs for Louis Vuitton and I wish they had cast them off in my direction). It is also about Wes Anderson's preoccupation with family dysfunction (see The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and The Royal Tenebaums, not to mention Rushmore). Specifically, Anderson is obsessed with irresponsible parenting and its side effects. Three brothers on a train search for mom (Anjelica Huston) after the death of their father. She has not attended the funeral and the boys want to know why. Connecting with this self-absorbed missionary proves elusive, but that does not mean she fails to nurture. One of the film's surprises is how, once these grown men find her in the depths of rural India, they regress to baby behavior, especially in a scene replicating a nursery, like the Darlings at home in Peter Pan. Don't be fooled: the cartoon colors and sight gags belie some serious stuff. Dr. Freud, this one's for you.
Another kind of doctor prevails in Julian Schnabel's masterpiece The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, based upon a book written in the most remarkable of circumstances. The film opens with antique x-rays of bones over the titles ushering us into the “locked-in,” dreamy consciousness of Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric), a Parisian fashion editor who at age 43 experienced a stroke that left him paralyzed except for the blinking of one eye. With the help of a team of nurses, including Schnabel's wife, Olatz Lopez Garamendia in a hilarious scene showing him how to use his tongue, he learns how to signal the alphabet in eye blinks and thus arduously composes his narrative. Shot in the actual French hospital where Bauby was treated, the film images his post-stroke world: the weight and immobility of the diver in water, the lightness and freedom of the butterfly. The one-eyed point of view was the central conceit of Ron Harwood's adaptation, the Academy Award winning screenwriter (for The Pianist) wrote me in an email, the images embellished by the outsized artist/ director Julian Schnabel. At the festival's press conference, Schnabel revealed that making this film helped him deal with the death of his father Jack, a butcher who died at age 92 in 2004. On screen, Bauby shaves his father (Max von Sydow) in perhaps the most sensitive father-son scene ever filmed. The candid Schnabel recounted a time when he helped his father in the bath reminding him not to shit in the comforting water, which of course he did. Too much information, and yet, onscreen that tenderness translates to an extraordinary, human scale movie. Regina Weinreich