Herzog in Udaipur
It’s difficult to think of a place that’s a more romantic setting for a romantic getaway than Udaipur. The temples and palaces alone are enough to offer the most splendid sense of otherworldly beauty, and suggest promises of a kind of paradise on earth that is usually only found in fairy tales and story books. Udaipur’s skyline is a spectacular thing to see, from any angle, but looking at it across the lake when the sun is setting is a think of enormous and impossible beauty. It looks like a city that should be in the movies, and it actually is. Many famous films from the 60s were made here, taking advantage of the natural vistas and gorgeous palaces in Udaipur, India. Hotel accommodations can be as breathtaking as well.
Some of the most elegant lodgings are in the palaces, so that the dream of living in an ancient palace in India can be a reality, at least for a little while. The other lodgings are no less hospitable, combining the incredible classic romanticism of the city with the latest in contemporary technologies. It’s a splendid city to fall to sleep in, and just as magnificent to wake up, enjoying the exotic splendor all around you, and taking in some of the hotel’s excellent cuisine before setting out to further your adventures here. It’s a great place for movie buffs, and if you’re a Herzog fan, you might enjoy following his footprints left in the artistic landscape here.
He’s one of the most interesting directors the world has right now, and he’s done a share of films in so-called exotic locations, and sometimes his work takes on an enormously ethnographic slant, but complex enough that the film is commenting on filmmaking itself while the ethnography questions its own ethnography. That’s certainly part of the appeal of his Jag Mandir made here in the early 1990s. The story is ostensibly a documentary effort to record the efforts of a Maharaj to demonstrate to his son the immense importance of the local culture before it is wiped away by global culture, and he hires Andre Heller to arrange a festival. In typical Herzog fashion, part of the true story is truly true, and part of it is truly not, and we’re left to decode what’s essential.