I’m going down

Last Sunday night I attended the suprise birthday party of my friend in one of the Filipino restaurants here in Cambodia. Her husband asked a couple of us to help him organize it and the party went well, even if the surprise element of the birthday proved to be debatable (they arrived ahead of most of the guests).

On the way home I dropped by my neighborhood friendly (pirated) DVD store to browse at the new titles. I got three films and as of this writing I have seen all of them. But I will only talk about the two not just because of their inherent odd-ness. Both are road movies (a la Little Miss Sunshine), both are gloomy and tragic (while one has a bit more comic elements), and both of them have a certain exuberance within the tragic circumstances.

The Darjeeling Limited, the 5th movie directed by Wes Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou), shows three semi-estranged brothers (Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Jason Schwartzman) who are travelling by rail across India. The trip is planned by Francis (Wilson) with obsessive attention to detail and with an explicit therapeutic objective (for them to bond, and later, to see their mother who ran off to become a nun). But soon, circumstances and the nature of the brothers lead them astray from their precious itinerary.

The brothers share a common attachment to material things: expensive clothing (Francis), a girlfriend who has walked away (Jack), their dead father’s eyeglasses and shaver (Peter), and a set of monogrammed luggages (all three). They find their mother–who runs away again the next morning, save 2 out of 3 boys from drowning, and just when you think they’re ready to resume their interrupted lives in America, they discard all their baggages (physical and psychological, presumably) and decide to stay in India.

Into The Wild, directed by Sean Penn, tells the true story of Christopher Johnson McCandless aka Alexander Supertramp who in 1990 (after graduating in university) donated his $24,000.00 savings to charity then set off on a 2-year journey that took him from Mississippi, the Pacific Northwest, the wheat fields of the northern prairies, and to Alaska, where he died of starvation as a complication of eating a poisonous plant by mistake. Along the way he meets and touches the lives of a middle-aged hippie couple, a rambunctious wheat farmer, a 16 year-old singer, and an old widower who lost his wife and only child to a drunk driver. McCandless is brilliantly played by Emile Hirsch (The Girl Next Door), he is at once innocent and worldly, and consistently charming and intelligent.

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