Hotel Chevalier

Hotel Chevalier is a short film set in a Paris hotel room, where an American named Jack Whitman has been living. His phone rings, and a woman he knows announces that she is on her way to see him. Her arrival sets off a reunion in which the state of their relationship comes into focus, leaving open whether the two will rekindle anything or whether they have already reached the end. The film serves as a prologue to The Darjeeling Limited, which was released the same year.

Wes Anderson directed and wrote the short, and it is the seventh of the 26 films he has directed in chronological order, arriving between The Darjeeling Limited and Fantastic Mr. Fox. Jason Schwartzman plays Jack Whitman, with Natalie Portman as Jack's girlfriend and small supporting turns from Waris Ahluwalia and Michel Castejon. Patrice Haddad produced, and the production involved Fox Searchlight Pictures, American Empirical Pictures and Première Heure.

Running 13 minutes, the film is a two-hander of sorts, built around a single encounter rather than a plot with multiple strands. On TMDB it holds a rating of 6.9 out of 10 from 943 votes, indicating a modest but steady level of viewer interest in a short made as a companion piece to a feature.