Hotel Chevalier is the kind of thing Wes Anderson could've written in his sleep- or for that matter written in his sleep while on the plane from the US to France to shoot in two days and edit on his computer. But in such a quick burst of minor creativity he has created a stark, amusing and tragic little situation that makes clearer (if not totally clear) the disconnect between Jack (Schwartzmann's character from Darjeeling Limited) and the 'ex-girlfriend' (Portman, with her V for Vendetta cut coming back in and her attitude like that of a pure b***ch). At first Jack has no idea she's coming, by the long pauses they have (albeit he asks why she pauses so long, when he paused longer), and orders a grilled cheese sandwich. She arrives. She brushes her teeth. She decides against going into a bath Jack's specially prepared- as in Darjeeling we see the obsessive-control side to the Whitman family via the IPOD machine playing the song- and instead they go into a very 'French' kind of torturous love scene.
It's erotic in what isn't shown; one might expect this to finally be *the* one, for skin-flick fans anyway, where Portman goes nude. She does, by the way, but tastefully in the Anderson sense- we're not getting the wacky nudity of the girl from Life Aquatic who never has a shirt on, or the lesbian girlfriend of Paltrow in that one shot in Tenenbaums. By the end, it doesn't make any grand statement about love or love in a hotel room or Paris, but in a self-contained way Anderson's created a mini-masterwork of emotional frustration in the midst of crazy lust. And, by a stroke of something of a quasi-in-joke, like one of the 'brilliant' short stories that the character Jack writes that are 'fictional' though never really at the same time.
