Hotel Chevalier

MOVIE #1,323 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 01.29.24 Until his recent (2023) batch of Ronald Dahl adaptations, this feels like the lone proper short of Anderson's career. And even so it's literally a companion to The Darjeeling Limited — featuring Jason Schwartzman and Natalie Portman, the latter of which actually pops up briefly in the feature as a wink to those who are familiar with this (and nobody else) — so it feels slight by design, in a sense. Even though it was originally conceived as a standalone project, it still feels like something that could easily have been folded into the main drama alongside one of the other flashbacks. It features the raciest sex scene in the entire Anderson catalog (although still relatively tame) and some of the cringiest late 20s dialogue. It's no shocker that Anderson doesn't work in this form often. I don't think he's best suited for it naturally.

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Hotel Chevalier is a 2007 short film written and directed by Wes Anderson. Starring Jason Schwartzman and Natalie Portman as former lovers who reunite in a Paris hotel room, the 13-minute film acts as a prologue to Anderson's 2007 feature The Darjeeling Limited. It was shot on location in a Parisian hotel by a small crew and self-financed by Anderson, who initially intended it to be a stand-alone work. Its first showing was at the Venice Film Festival première of the feature film and it made its own debut later that month at Apple Stores in four U.S. cities. It was released on September 2, 2007.