Notes on a Scandal

This week in Edmonton, the Global Visions film festival takes place—that's an annual festival of socially-conscious documentary films. Here's a piece I wrote for the local alt-weekly SEE Magazine's cover story about the event: an interview with Rory Kennedy, who directed the excellent, Emmy-winning Ghosts of Abu Ghraib.

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Near the end of Rory Kennedy’s documentary Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, Specialist Sabrina Harman holds up the notorious photo of her smiling broadly and giving the camera a cheerful thumbs-up while crouching over the corpse of Manadel al-Jamadi—an Iraqi prisoner who was tortured to death in November 2003 while in American custody—and explains how that appalling image came into existence. “It was just supposed to be a dead guy,” she says matter-of-factly. “We didn’t realize until after these photos that he was bleeding in places that you wouldn’t bleed from just getting a heart attack.... There really wasn’t anything negative towards this guy. I didn’t know he was just murdered. I just thought, ‘It’s war. It’s another dead guy. No big deal.’”

“The thumbs-up?” she continues. “I got that from the little [Iraqi] kids. And the smile—well, I always smile for the camera. It’s just the natural thing you do.”

Was Harman (and the eight other U.S. soldiers immediately responsible for the widespread mistreatment and torture of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison) some kind of psychopath? How else do you explain such a monstrous disregard for human dignity? Even if you accept the notion that it was an isolated incident—the work of the so-called “nine bad apples” on the Abu Ghraib night shift—how was the situation able to remain unchecked for so long?

“I do think there was a certain level of sadism on the night shift,” says Kennedy over the phone from her home in New York City, the coos of her newborn child providing an unlikely accompaniment to our talk of human-rights atrocities. “But I think it all happened under a general understanding that it was okay. So if you ask who’s responsible—well, the people who committed the acts are, and they paid the price by going to prison. But I think the film also shows that these 11 low-ranking soldiers served time, but nobody up the chain of command served time. Which is a great injustice, given the amount of evidence we have that they knew what was going on—and authorized it.”

There have been multiple federal investigations into the events at Abu Ghraib, all of which failed to find a link between prisoner abuse and senior officials, but Kennedy argues that there still has not been an authoritative, independent inquiry empowered to follow the events beyond the prison, without fear of repercussion, all the way up the chain of command to the Pentagon and the White House.

In some ways, her film—which won an Emmy in September for Outstanding Non-Fiction Special after airing on HBO—is the closest thing we have to such an investigation. Kennedy certain comes from prime liberal stock (she’s Robert F. Kennedy’s daughter, after all), but her film is meticulously impartial. Like Charles Ferguson’s recent Iraq War documentary No End in Sight, her approach is functional rather than political—she’s less interested in scoring points against Bush, Rumsfeld or the Republicans than in pinpointing the decisions that led to this disaster.

Of course, there’s no getting away from the fact that most of those decisions were made by Republicans: the decision to staff Abu Ghraib with a skeleton crew of inexperienced soldiers with no experience as correctional officers; the decision to send General Geoffrey Miller to Abu Ghraib in order to institute the same “enhanced” interrogation tactics there that he’d used during his previous post at Guantanamo Bay; and the crucial philosophical decision that in the War on Terror, the U.S. was not bound by the Geneva conventions, or indeed any of several international agreements governing the treatment of prisoners of war.

“Their frame of mind was that they were dealing with a group of people that didn’t have a nation per se,” Kennedy says, “and who didn’t sign the Geneva convention. You had an enemy that was going to behead people and torture people, and the only way to fight this enemy was to do so on their own ground. Which I think really diminishes us as a country. Ever since George Washington, we have made a point of treating prisoners with dignity and respect—that has been our policy for over 200 years. And I think once you disregard that, you’re changing who we are as a people, and what we represent to the rest of the world. I think it sends us down a very perilous road, and it saddens me that we’ve continued on this path, even in the aftermath of Abu Ghraib.”

The film may not be flashy or especially “cinematic”—but with those still-horrifying images of Satar Jabar hooded, arms outstretched, standing on a box, or Specialist Charles Graner presiding over those piles of naked bodies at its disposal, it probably doesn’t need to be. Kennedy says the film’s visual plainness was by design. “Ultimately,” she says, “there was so much smoke and mirrors around this issue coming from the administration, that I felt people just wanted to know what happened, and so I should be as straightforward as possible. I didn’t want to manipulate the photographs or manipulate what the interviews looked like. I wanted to show the words from the documents [I quoted] in context so that people could feel like I was giving them the straight goods. So at the end of the day, I wound up with a pretty old-school documentary format, but it was as the result of a lot of thought.”

But Kennedy wants to see more than just thought from the people who’ve watched Ghosts of Abu Ghraib—whether they caught it during its HBO broadcast, at grassroots “viewing parties” across North America, or at festivals like Global Visions here in Edmonton. “I think the film is about something bigger than Abu Ghraib,” she says. “It’s about who we are as a nation. Until we get to the bottom of Abu Ghraib and address these issues head-on, we’re going to have to deal with the implications of America’s new reputation. A lot of the policies that were put in place after 9/11 and led to Abu Ghraib are still in place—just last week, memos were released that showed the CIA continued to torture people through methods like waterboarding, exposure to extreme cold, sleep deprivation—all while the Bush administration has continued to deny that we use torture.

“I resist the temptation to call people liars, because it’s such a horrible term,” she concludes, “but I really feel this administration is lying to us continually about these issues. And we can’t accept it anymore. We can’t afford not to do anything. The courts, unfortunately, are not supporting an anti-torture effort, the media has been really timid about revealing the truth about what’s happening. And so, I think we need to rely on people to stand up and demand we change the course of our history.”

Estrangers on a Train

There’s a famous scene in the movie Contempt where director Fritz Lang grumpily derides Cinemascope, saying it’s “only good for snakes and funerals!”

So it seems fitting that snakes and funerals should both play an important role in The Darjeeling Limited, the new film by Wes Anderson, one of the modern masters of the Cinemascope frame. Lang didn’t say anything about trains, but they’re also a perfect Cinemascope subject, and few trains have been filmed with the loving attention that Anderson lavishes on the one that provides a cramped temporary home for the three Whitman brothers during their trip across India—the first time they’ve spoken in over a year.

Jack (Jason Schwartzman) is the youngest, an author of transparently autobiographical short stories whose hangdog expression and droopy mustache don’t seem to hamper his ability to seduce women, including the train’s beautiful stewardess. Peter (Adrien Brody) is the middle child, still grieving the death of his father, who’s left his very pregnant wife back home to bond with his siblings. And Francis (Owen Wilson) is the control-freak oldest brother, his head still swaddled in bandages after a horrific car accident, who’s planned out the entire micromanaged voyage, complete with laminated daily itineraries full of precisely timed side trips to some of “the most spiritual places in India.”

The inability of these three overprivileged brothers to appreciate the beauty of their surroundings provides the film with much of its humour—they’re too busy guzzling painkillers and cough medicine and trying to sneak cigarettes without the stern chief steward catching them. When they visit their first shrine, they spend all their time squabbling over who gets to wear Francis’ belt to bother praying. (Small wonder that their mother—played beautifully by Anjelica Huston—decided to run off and join a convent of nuns in the Himalayas. If you had kids like these, who wouldn’t want to get as far away from them as possible?)

As far as I can tell, the critical and popular backlash against Wes Anderson began with The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou—especially that publicity photo of Anderson wearing some kind of expensive-looking tailored suit and an aviator scarf, sitting behind the controls of one of the undersea capsules that had been specially built for the movie. Suddenly, he no longer seemed like a lovable eccentric with an eye for detailed set design; now he was an effete megalomaniac bent on controlling every square inch of the camera frame. It was as if he’d become one of his own characters, a prisoner in his own dollhouse. What once seemed distinctive, quirky and eccentric now came off as heartless, emotionally remote, mannered beyond belief. Was this the only thing Wes Anderson wanted to make—more “Wes Anderson movies”?

And sure enough, the knock on The Darjeeling Limited is that it’s just more of the same—yet another dose of visually fussed-over Wes Anderson whimsy. Even if that were the case, I don’t understand that criticism—what if I like Wes Anderson’s visual style? What’s wrong with getting more of it in a brand-new setting? And I don’t think it’s true that Anderson is just treading water in The Darjeeling Limited either.

Sure, many of his signature tropes are on display here: slow-motion sequences set to British Invasion pop hits, plenty of flat tableaux, lots of those quick 90-degree horizontal swish pans he’s so fond of. But I think filming on location in India has loosened him up a little—his actors don’t feel like his personal dress-up dolls, pinned in position within the frame the way they often did in Zissou. There’s a nice balance between the meticulous and the messy in this movie—from the bustle of the Indian villages the Whitmans explore to the way the camera can never quite hold steady when it’s on the train.

Anderson’s soundtrack borrows a lot of music from old Satyajit Ray movies, and while The Darjeeling Limited has a much archer comic sensibility than Ray, it has the same humanism. There’s nothing in Ray’s work like the beautiful scene late in The Darjeeling Limited, set to the Rolling Stones’ “Play With Fire,” which revisits the film’s various minor characters and depicts them all as passengers in the same train even though they’re actually scattered all over Europe and Asia—but I think Ray would recognize a kindred impulse within it, a sense that everyone in the world is on the same voyage.

Indeed, the saddest character in this blissfully melancholy little movie is the businessman played by Bill Murray, who in the film’s opening sequence races frantically to catch the train as it pulls out of the station, but isn’t quite fast enough to climb on board. What could be sadder than missing a trip on The Darjeeling Limited?

George Clooney: Legal Janitor

Who is Michael Clayton? Just about every character in Tony Gilroy’s legal thriller takes a stab at defining him. He’s a “miracle worker,” says one of his colleagues. Others call him a “fixer.” “You’ve got all the cops thinking you’re a lawyer and all the lawyers thinking you’re a cop,” one character tells him—and not affectionately. Clayton actually is a lawyer, but not the kind who ever appears in court. Clayton dismissively calls himself a janitor—he’s the guy who comes in to mop up the messes that the other guys at his firm can’t handle. He makes drunk-driving cases go away and makes sure that wealthy clients’ delinquent children never get hauled in front of a judge.

He’s also kind of a failure. He’s 45 years old, with no prospects of ever making partner. He’s smart and good-looking, but he’s in a business where younger, smarter people lie pretty thick on the ground, and those good looks of his aren’t going to last forever. He’s a compulsive gambler, and he’s just blown all of his savings investing in a failed restaurant. As Michael Clayton opens, he owes money everywhere, and he’s in no mood to have his conscience pricked.

But of course, that’s exactly what happens when Clayton is assigned to babysit Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson), the veteran lawyer overseeing the case for the defence in a massive class-action lawsuit against an evil agricultural conglomerate called U/North. Edens, it seems, has gone off his meds and undergone a spectacular, Howard Beale-style psychological meltdown—not only is he mad as hell, and not only is he not going to take it anymore, he’s also planning to turn over pages and pages of incriminating documents to the plaintiffs. As Clayton attempts to protect his old friend, he’s tailed every step of the way by a pair of sinister black-bag operatives dispatched by U/North’s twitchy in-house counsel, played by Tilda Swinton, who seems only a few weeks away from following Edens into the nuthouse herself.

Michael Clayton is the directorial debut of Tony Gilroy, who wrote the screenplays for the three Jason Bourne movies. (He also wrote the ice-skating romance The Cutting Edge, but that was many years ago.) Gilroy makes thrillers for the 21st century—he knows that the James Bond ear is over, and that the real international villains aren’t megalomaniacs in volcano fortresses but white-collar types in tall office buildings who do much of their evil via cellphone and over the internet. Gilroy has obviously been studying the tense, understated, morally ambiguous thrillers Alan Pakula and Sydney Pollack made in the ’70s—Pollack even turns up in Michael Clayton as Clayton’s boss. But the film also has a snappy, modern tone—Gilroy’s willingness to pare the exposition down to the bone, and the way he edits the scenes involving Tilda Swinton, cutting back and forth between her nervous preparations for her public appearances and the appearances themselves, reminded me of Steven Soderbergh pictures like The Limey. (Soderbergh was one of Michael Clayton’s executive producers.)

Gilroy has also written a good starring role for George Clooney. It’s not a great role—it stays narrowly within Clooney’s straight-talking, movie-star comfort zone and never really asks him to give this character any unexpected shadings. (It’s also a little hard to buy the cool-as-a-cucumber Clooney as a compulsive cardplayer—he just doesn’t project the self-destructive streak that you see in most hardcore gamblers.) But Clooney, as always, knows instinctively how to hold the screen, and there are much worse ways to spend two hours than watching him coolly trying to reravel his life and matching wits with corporate baddies.

Who is Michael Clayton? Even by the end of the film, he remains a bit of a cipher. The film that bears his name is easier to reach a conclusion about: it’s a satisfying, craftsmanlike thriller that respects your intelligence and treats you like a grownup. Man, at this rate, my man-crush on Clooney is never going to go away.

The Object of My Affleck-tion

I like the idea of casting Casey Affleck as a private eye. He’s 32 years old, but he looks maybe 23—and a scrawny 23 at that, as if he’s been skipping meals ever since childhood. There’s a scene early in Gone Baby Gone where he and fellow detective Michelle Monaghan walk into a seedy bar hoping to pick up some clues on a case they’re investigating, and she looks more like the big sister looking out for her kid brother than his partner. When the bartender scowlingly identifies himself as “Big Dave,” Affleck grins and introduces himself as “Medium Patrick.” The bartender doesn’t so much as crack a smile.

The best movie detectives, I think, are guys like Patrick Kenzie, the guy Casey Affleck plays in Gone Baby Gone—and maybe that’s why detective movies rarely do well at the box office. They’re guys who aren’t very physically imposing. They carry a gun, but they still get beaten up a lot. They’re not rich. They scrape by. They tend to have a smart mouth on them, They don’t get along with authority figures. They get fooled by other people’s lies, and only figure out the truth when it’s too late for it to do much good. They can be counted on to do the right thing, but they rarely see any reward for their good deeds. If movies are about peddling wish-fulfillment fantasies, Gone Baby Gone is a failure—nobody would want to switch places with Patrick Kenzie, not even if it meant you got to sleep every night with Michelle Monaghan.

But as a crime picture, Gone Baby Gone is a big success—well-plotted, engrossing, and full of tangy, grimy details of life in lower-class Boston, land of meth addicts, white-trash thugs and terrible housekeepers. It’s based on the fourth book in Dennis Lehane’s series of Patrick Kenzie novels, but it doesn’t matter if you haven’t read any of the first three—once you figure out that the cute girl who tags along with Kenzie on all his cases isn’t a meddling lover but his full-fledged investigative partner, you’re off and running.

The complicated plot begins with Kenzie and Gennaro being asked to join the search for an abducted little girl. (Her mother, a thoroughly amoral, drug-running alcoholic, had left her alone in the house while she went off to have Big Dave pour her a few bourbons.) The trail of clues eventually leads them to a Haitian drug dealer, $130,000 in missing cash, a disastrous midnight payoff at an abandoned quarry, an armed standoff with a houseful of coke-fueled ex-cons, and a tough Louisiana-born cop named Remy (Ed Harris) who seems to know more about the case than he’s letting on.

The film was directed and co-written by Ben Affleck (his first screenplay credit since sharing the Oscar with Matt Damon for Good Will Hunting), and if you believe the arc all the magazine profiles about him are using, he seems to have taken on this project almost as an act of penance after taking a string of flops that included Surviving Christmas, Gigli, Daredevil and Paycheck—movies it’s hard to imagine Affleck regarded as anything more than, well, easy paycheques. What happened to him? How could someone who was best friends with Kevin Smith become so cynical?

Gone Baby Gone is a cynical movie too—but I mean that in a good way. It’s a tough movie set in a grim world where even people who set out with honourable motives can’t help but leave a lot of dead bodies in their wake. And yet it doesn’t wallow in its own grimness, the way Mystic River (also based on a Lehane novel) occasionally did. Affleck is more interested in a smooth-running plot and sharply drawn characters. He gets a particularly vivid characterization out of Amy Ryan (from TV’s The Wire) as the missing girl’s mother, Helene: the woman is utterly despicable, and yet Ryan plays her in a way that lets you see Helene’s deluded image of herself as a put-upon victim.

The whole story climaxes with Kenzie having to make a difficult ethical decision, and while I don’t want to give anything away, I applaud Affleck for cheating neither the choice Kenzie makes, nor the consequences that come with it. Will Affleck be making equally tough choices with his career from here on in? Gone Baby Gone sets a promising precedent.

The Ties That Blind

If you were to cross paths with Burt and Linda Pugach, they’d probably strike you as a fairly typical elderly couple from the Bronx: they putter around the house, they go to the same restaurant for breakfast every Saturday, they kvetch about neighbours, and they bicker with each other the whole time in a tone that makes it impossible to tell where irritation ends and affection begins.

Spend a little time with them, however, and you’ll notice that Linda’s dark glasses and her wig aren’t just a fashion statement; she’s actually blind and bald. Hang out with them at their house, and maybe they’ll tell you the story of how Linda got that way—God knows they’ve shared it with practically every tabloid reporter and daytime TV talk show host in the country.

You see, back in 1959, Burt was a prosperous lawyer (albeit a fairly shady one). He’d been courting Linda for a while, escorting her to the nightclub he owned, showering her with gifts and taking her on rides in his private plane. But when it became apparent that Burt was never going to divorce his wife, Linda broke off the relationship and soon was engaged to a new man. After a few months of fruitlessly stalking her and threatening her, Burt decided that if he couldn’t have Linda, then no one could—and he hired a couple of thugs to throw lye in her face. Burt was sent to prison, while Linda, blinded and disfigured, tried to adjust to her new life. An admirable goal... except in Linda’s case, “adjust to her new life” wound up meaning “marrying the man who blinded her when he finally got out of jail 13 years later.”

I can’t think of another movie that made me shout with disbelief more times than Crazy Love—just when you think your opinion of Burt couldn’t get any lower, he finds a way to sink to a new level of moral vacuousness. (This is a guy whose best buddy defends his relationship with him by shrugging and saying, “Even Hitler had friends!”) I’m not a psychiatrist, so I don’t know if Burt is a sociopath, a psychopath or just an asshole, but you can at least console yourself with the thought that he seems to have received the perfect karmic reward for his actions: he now gets to spend every waking hour with Linda. And as one of the couple’s friends remarks, it’s hard to tell whether that’s a joy or a punishment. Think of them as a sordid, squabbling, real-life version of the Joker and Harley Quinn.

It’s Linda who emerges from the film as the more compelling and frightening figure of the two. After all, the film strongly suggests that she took Burt back not because she still loved him but because she needed financial security, and also had come to believe that Burt was the only man who was now even capable of loving her. In a sick way, she also seems to relish the media attention that her marriage stirred up, no matter how lurid the headlines might have been or how prurient Geraldo’s and Sally Jessy’s questions became. You can’t help but wonder: if she’d never met Burt, would she have stayed the nice, shy Jewish girl she was in 1959? Are all of us just one crazy relationship away from transforming into a lovestruck freak ourselves? And could you argue that maybe every marriage is a milder version of the Pugaches—that couple stay together for more unhealthy reasons than healthy ones.

Directors Dan Klores and Fisher Stevens don’t delve too deeply into the Pugaches’ psychology—and who can blame them for keeping their distance from that snakepit? They’re content simply to share this bizarre story and let it speak for itself (aided by plenty of slickly edited home movies, talking-head interviews and vintage music cues). Crazy Love left me disturbed, dumbfounded and praying that if I ever meet a girl who loves me as much as Burt Pugach loves Linda, she’ll stay the hell away from me.

Hallelujah, I'm a Bum

I always get the feeling that if you ever ran into Sean Penn at a cocktail party and told him you enjoyed the films he directed, he’d do nothing but scowl at you. Maybe he’d make some terse comment about how his movies weren’t meant to be “enjoyed,” man, before stalking off into some corner of the backyard to sulk in peace. You’ve got to respect Penn for the passion he brought to films like The Indian Runner and The Crossing Guard, and I thought he showed real growth as a filmmaker with The Pledge—but my God, what a bringdown that guy is! His films are so humourless, so willfully serious—so committed to being gloomy and gritty and real that, ironically, they don’t even seem to be taking place in the real world but in some grim alternate universe where everyone is either an alcoholic, a survivor of abuse, or the parent of a dead child.

Which is partly why I think Penn’s new film Into the Wild took me so much by surprise: it’s an up movie. And it manages to be up even though everybody in the audience knows it’s building towards the lonely, protracted death of its main character. That would be Chris McCandless, a young man who in 1990 rejected his prosperous Virginia upbringing, donated his life’s savings to Oxfam, gave himself the fanciful new name “Alexander Supertramp” and began exploring the American wilderness, taking odd jobs here and there and making just enough money to get him to his next destination. McCandless probably had more sensibility than sense to him, though, and when he decided to spend the winter roughing it in Alaska, he was fatally unprepared for survival—unable to find his way back to civilization, he died in the abandoned bus he’d been using for shelter, perhaps as a result of eating poisonous seeds, perhaps from simple starvation.

And while Penn spends a lot of time in that bus with the increasingly emaciated and desperate McCandless (played winningly by Emile Hirsch), he refuses to portray him as someone who wasted his life. On the contrary, Penn celebrates him as someone who lived his life exactly the way he wanted to, and who met some wonderful people and saw some beautiful sights along the way.

Shrewdly (and somewhat amazingly, given Penn’s fondness for political speechifying), Penn rarely has McCandless articulate his philosophy. There’s really only one scene in the movie where McCandless tries to explain himself—and who does he have to explain himself to but Vince Vaughn, whose reactions of amused disbelief hilariously puncture McCandless’ pomposity. (Vaughn is just one of several wonderful supporting performers in this film—Hal Holbrook, William Hurt, Catherine Keener and some guy named Brian Dierker are all outstanding.)

I have no interest in nature myself, and my natural inclination is to view McCandless as a self-righteous, possibly insane little twerp. But I do love loose, open, improvisational ’70s-style cinema, and Penn portrays McCandless’ odyssey with enough Terrence Malick flair to sweep me up in its spirit. This isn’t the leaf-loving Malick of The Thin Red Line, though—it’s the Malick of Badlands, the Malick whose characters were a little cut off from the rest of humanity, and for whom nature was just a little too hard-edged to give them solace.

Now, a friend whose taste I trust told me he had exactly the opposite reaction to Into the Wild, a view shaded, he said, by watching Charlie Rose interview Penn on TV. (Boy, if anything is guaranteed to turn you off a Sean Penn movie, it’s watching Sean Penn talk about it.) To my friend, Into the Wild reeked of bullshit and hypocrisy. He hated Penn’s decision to portray McCandless’ father as a wife-beater, which he apparently was not. He rolled his eyes at the scene where McCandless turns down a golden chance to go to bed with a sexy, willing young folksinger because she’s only 16. And he hated Penn’s decision to romanticize McCandless and his moment of death. In his view, Penn is using McCandless as a stand-in for himself, a saintly figure doggedly pursuing “the real”—while blithely altering or ignoring reality whenever it suits him.

I can’t deny the validity of this reading of the film, and yet I found myself swept up in Penn’s vision of the better, fuller life that still might exist, just outside the city limits—a vision, I might add, that nevertheless acknowledges McCandless’ selfishness and the enormous pain he inflicted upon his loved ones. Penn’s eye seems more benevolent, his attitude toward his characters more affectionate. Into the Wild is just a marvelous film. I hope I run into him at a party one day—I can’t wait to tell him how much I enjoyed it.

Suite Emotion

Wes Anderson’s new short film Hotel Chevalier begins with Jason Schwarzman reclining barefoot in bed in a luxury hotel suite in Paris, ordering a grilled cheese sandwich and some chocolate milk from room service. But his comfort is short-lived: moments later, he gets a phone call from his estranged girlfriend (Natalie Portman), who tells him she’s at the airport and that she’ll be at his door in half an hour.

Amusingly, his first instinct is to make the room look more like the set of a Wes Anderson movie. He picks up the newspapers scattered all over the floor, he unpacks a couple of small figurines from a cardboard box and arranges them into some kind of tabletop diorama, he places a few quirky knickknacks around the room (a couple of tiny handcranked musicboxes, a mounted butterfly), and he cues up an old song from the ’60s on his iPod stereo so that it can be playing when Portman enters the room.

This song, “Where Do You Go To, My Lovely?” by the British singer/songwriter Peter Sarstedt, may be the ultimate Wes Anderson music cue. It’s an offbeat British Invasion pop hit, but it’s an accordion waltz, so it also has that whiff of French nostalgia that Anderson is also so susceptible to. The lyrics are directed at a jet-setting girl who the singer evidently knew before she was rich (it's sort of a tender, inverse version of "Like a Rolling Stone"), and they’re a relentless catalogue of surface details—the clothes she wears, the street where her apartment is, the names of her famous friends, from the Aga Khan to Sacha Distel. It’s a long song, and the details keep piling up with the meticulous, evocative specificity of one of Wes Anderson’s sets, but as the chorus admits, all these details don’t bring the singer any closer to who this woman really is—“Tell me the thoughts that surround you,” he sings, “I want to look inside your head.” Alas, he never gets an answer.

Anderson never tells us what’s going on in Schwartzman or Portman’s heads, either, and that’s part of the beauty of Hotel Chevalier. It’s a mood piece, full of details and exchanges of dialogue that seem all the more evocative because they remain unexplained. We never learn precisely why Schwartzman fled to Paris and holed up in a Paris hotel room for over a month—was it something about his relationship with Portman, or something more? We don’t know what those dioramas are supposed to represent, or why Portman has bruises all over her body. When Portman kisses Schwartzman and tells him she doesn’t want to lose him as a friend, we don’t know what exactly Schwartzman means when he replies, “I promise I will never be your friend.”

The film, which runs about 13 minutes, was originally meant to precede Anderson’s new feature The Darjeeling Limited as a kind of prologue, but apparently that plan has been nixed—presumably it will eventually appear on the Darjeeling DVD, but if you want to see it before that, you need to go online. (It’s available as a free iTunes download in the U.S.; here in Canada, you’ll have to do a little more hunting.) In a way, I kind of wish Darjeeling didn’t exist—I’ve imagined my own backstory for these two characters and I’d be kind of disappointed to have the longer film prove me wrong.

Instead, I prefer to think of Schwartzman and Portman never leaving this hotel room. I want to think of them always poised the way they are in the short’s breathtakingly beautiful final shot, standing outside on the balcony, taking in the view, Schwartzman wearing a suit the exact blue-grey colour of the Paris sky at dusk, Portman wearing a robe the exact Velveeta-yellow colour of the room’s interior. Trust me: that—not Portman’s overhyped nude scene—is Hotel Chevalier’s money shot.