Director and symmetry-fetishist Wes Anderson has a new short film out. Called Come Together, it’s a Christmas tale about a train crew trying to make the best of an 11.5-hour weather delay, which guarantees to disrupt the Christmas celebrations of the train’s several passengers. It’s also an ad for H&M’s holiday campaign.
The fast-fashion label explained in a press release that the train was the perfect setting for its holiday collection, which the train’s passengers wear throughout the three-and-a-half minute film. But perhaps the best thing about the ad is that the clothes are incidental.
Instead of a sales pitch, the short is a typical Anderson story with all the usual trappings: bone-dry humor; concise, offbeat color palette; and a determined protagonist, played here by actor Adrien Brody, an Anderson favorite who appeared in his movies The Darjeeling Limited and The Grand Budapest Hotel (and voiced the field mouse in Fantastic Mr. Fox). Brody is Ralph, clad in a classic conductor’s hat and vest, who uses some ingenuity to put together an impromptu DIY Christmas for the waylaid travelers.
Brody, via the press release, said the film comes at a moment when “we could all do with giving a stranger a hug.”