I love this conversation because there's so much to love about all of them and you can't really argue with somebody who picks Rushmore or the royal tannin bombs or the grand Budapest hotel.

So really the conversation is less about competition and more about how one particular movie in this director's filmography affected someone personally.

How one particular angle of Anderson's vision hit that person squarely in the face because of where or when or who they were at that moment in their lives.

For me, that film is the Darjeeling limited.

The story about three brothers on a spiritual journey through India.

The brother who brings them together, Francis says the journey is about trust, but it's really about communication how after a year of not speaking and a lifetime of upper middle class anxiety, their ability to talk with each other coherently has completely broken down.

The first conversation they have on the train, tells you everything you need to know.

It plays like some hilarious group chat where one or all three of the brothers has terrible cell service and struggles to keep up to you want to read a short story I wrote in France.

Mm hmm mm hmm mm hmm mm hmm.

I think everybody knows that close friends and especially family don't always answer the questions that you ask them.

They answer the question that they think your question implies.

They try to anticipate where you're going at its best.

This makes for a wonderful shorthand but at its worst assumptions like these can be incredibly frustrating and make for a stilted communication that never hits its mark with everyone zigzagging and working at cross purposes.

In the Darjeeling limited, Jack Francis and Peter spend a lot of time communicating to themselves through each other.

Kind of Francis is especially guilty of this.

He organizes this bogus spiritual journey to process his father's death now a year passed.

He thinks maybe that if you can't connect his brothers through discovering some deep profundity in India that the tragedy will be senseless.

After all, we're told that pain makes us stronger, that it has lessons to teach what if it doesn't.

He's so desperate for connection that he spends the entire movie liberalizing it in the form of an agreement.

Let's make an agreement.

Let's make another agreement, let's make another agree.

Let's make another agreement.

We agree to that.

We agree to that.

We agree to that and we agree to that and you agree to that Jack and Peter process the grief in their own ways.

Jack writes a short story about the funeral and he's also grieving by the way the end of a romantic relationship, something that's detailed in a really great short film that precedes Darjeeling called Hotel chevalier with Natalie Portman.

The brothers seem to think that his solution to everything is to run away, but as that little gift from his ex shows grief is like a scent, It lingers and has a deep link with memory run away and it will follow.

You try to destroy it and you'll only unleash the aroma in a more potent form, but it's peter I think.

Who takes the tragedy hardest?

Not only is he the angriest of the three, but his entire life has become distorted.

His caring wife is weeks away from having their first child and he's in India, he appropriates his father's belongings, namely his prescription sunglasses, which make the world unfocused in the world.

Tannenbaum's Richie hides behind giant sunglasses so that the world I can't see him in darjeeling.

Jack wears prescription sunglasses so that he can't see the world.

I think that communication has been at the heart of West Anderson's style from the start, it might be that he has similar anxieties to Francis, A need to ensure that a message given has been received.

This is one way to read all his 90 and 100 and 80 degree quick pans in the same way that Francis asks for an agreement for everything.

Anderson takes the Kuleshov effect where viewers derive meaning from the relationship between two shots perfected by Hitchcock and fills in all the missing information showing how those two or three or four compositions are connected.

Of course wes Anderson loves to match personal crises with visual motifs and he doesn't shy away from obvious ones either, like brothers unwilling to feel real trauma, all having some form of painkiller symbols of failed communication can come in the form of a dropped bag.

A command shouted at no one in particular.

A soft whisper before sex.

A sense of moving forward but not getting anywhere.

Can be a train that gets lost.

How can a train be lost?

Jack's tendency to turn his life into the perfect fiction can be made physical in the form of an ipod speaker and this too is likely a personality trait that Anderson shares.

I mean, how is this any different from this?

Mhm.

I don't necessarily think the Darjeeling Limited is the formal peak of Anderson's work, but I think that it's the most human of his films since the ensemble is limited mostly to three people.

We get a deeper dive into each personality and much more importantly into the web that makes them in many ways a single organism.

One of my favorite things about the film are not so obvious visual flourish is the design of the train compartment, namely these two equally sized panels on both sides of the interior wall.

One is a mirror and the other is an internal window, but of course it's hard to tell those two things apart, Francis, jack and Peter are constantly throwing barbs at one another.

Feeling out the contours of their own identities.

Sometimes they hit the target.

Other times it's reflected back.

Mostly it's both.

And I guess that's the point about communication.

You can't help speaking to yourself when you speak to others.

Others can't help hearing something about themselves, even when they know that you're projecting onto them.

The Darjeeling Limited is my favorite Wes Anderson movie.

It came out when I was just starting college trying to find my identity in others and it hit me square in the face and yeah, I do think it's the best for now but that's not definitive.

It's just the opening salvo in a conversation between me and everybody who watches this channel, a bunch of film geeks.

So what do you think?

Yeah.

Hey everybody thanks for watching.

I've been waiting forever to do a video on Wes Anderson.

This was so much fun and meet my friends really do have these conversations all the time about which we think is the best and you know I love all, I love Moonrise Kingdom and I love life aquatic and and and they're also good.

But you know everybody's got their favorite for one reason or another, this is mine.

What's yours?

Let me know in the comments.

And if you want to subscribe to this channel you can click right over here and if you want to pledge a dollar or $3 helps the most per video.

Thank you so much for watching.