HOTEL CHEVALIER

Directed by Wes Anderson. Starring Jason Schwartzman and Natalie Portman. Now available online. ****1/2

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 little-boy meal–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 to Zizi Jeanmaire. 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 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.