Hotel Chevalier (2007)

Hotel Chevalier runs thirteen minutes and concerns a man in a Paris hotel room, a woman who arrives unannounced, and the ruins of whatever they had. Wes Anderson shot it on a small budget with a small crew, and it plays like a short story found in the back pages of a literary quarterly. Jason Schwartzman wears a yellow bathrobe. Natalie Portman wears an expression of patient devastation. A Peter Sarstedt song plays twice, which is once more than strictly necessary and exactly the right number of times.

The two former lovers orbit each other with the wary politeness of people who have already said the worst things and are now reduced to small talk about toothbrushes and room service. There is nudity, briefly, and a bruise on an arm that nobody explains. The film declines to explain it too. This is a work of mood and withheld information, and it resists every opportunity to instruct its audience on how to feel or what to think. A concierge appears in the lobby for a moment, played by an actor of South Asian descent, and he answers a telephone. The film has no thoughts about this, and neither should we.

There is no argument here about representation, no meditation on gender, no critique of wealth despite the Louis Vuitton suitcase and the expensive room. The characters are sad inside a nice hotel, and that is the whole of it. Anderson has made a career of arranging beautiful objects and letting them sit in silence, and this short is that instinct distilled to its purest, most harmless form. It is a prologue to a longer film, self-financed, released free, and downloaded half a million times by people who wanted to see what the fuss was about. The fuss, it turns out, was quiet. The film ends on a balcony with a toothpick and a nod, asking nothing of us except our attention. In a cultural moment that treats cinema as civic instruction, this is either a relic or a relief, depending on your appetite for being told things.

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