Hotel Chevalier
| Hotel Chevalier | |
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Promotional film poster
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| Directed by | Wes Anderson |
| Written by | Wes Anderson |
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| Music by | Pascal Rogé |
| Cinematography | Robert Yeoman |
| Edited by | Vincent Marchand |
| Distributed by | Fox Searchlight Pictures |
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13:05 |
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Hotel Chevalier is an American-French short film written and directed by Wes Anderson and released in 2007. 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 on September 2, 2007, and it made its own debut later that month at Apple Stores in four U.S. cities.
The day after the film's première, it was made freely available from the iTunes Store for one month, during which time it was downloaded more than 500,000 times. The film garnered near universal critical acclaim from reviewers, who compared it favorably with The Darjeeling Limited and praised its richness, poignancy, and careful construction.
In a hotel lobby, the concierge answers a phone call from a guest's room. A man (Jason Schwartzman) lies on a hotel bed in a yellow bathrobe, watching the black-and-white American war film Stalag 17 and reading the newspaper. After ordering room service from the concierge in broken French, he receives a call from a woman whose voice he recognizes. She tells him she is on her way from the airport and asks for his room number. Despite objecting that he did not tell her she could come, the man consents nevertheless. He then hurriedly attempts to tidy the room – pausing to play the opening bars of the song "Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)?" by Peter Sarstedt on his stereo system – and runs a bath.
The man is again lying on the bed, now in a gray suit. Hearing a knock, he starts the song playing again before opening the door to a woman (Natalie Portman). After staring at him for several seconds, the woman breaks the silence by asking what music is playing. Receiving no response, she steps into the room and presents the man with a bouquet of flowers. When she moves to kiss him on the mouth, he turns his head away and they embrace instead. He closes the door and asks how she found him; she replies that it "wasn't actually that hard". She moves around the room browsing through his possessions, brushes her teeth with his toothbrush and declines to take the bath he had run for her.
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Wikipedia