A girl reads a book entitled: "The Grand Budapest Hotel". In it, the author writes how he was once in that hotel and met an ageing man, Zero Moustafa, who told him how he started working in the hotel as a lobby boy as a kid in 1 9 3 2, when the hotel was part of the Republic of Zubrowka: his boss, concierge Gustave, found out his 84-year old mistress, Madame D., was killed, and inherited a valuable painting from her. However, her son, Dmitri, wanted to take all the inheritance and managed to frame Gustave as her killer. Zero manages to escape with Gustave from prison and prove that Madame D. left all her estate to Gustave. After Gustave was shot by the occupying soldiers, Zero inherited the hotel.
“The Grand Budapest Hotel” lives inside an alternate reality world suitable for a “Rick and Morty” episode—just like “The Wings of Honneamise” speak only of two fictional rival states, but the allegory of the Cold War space race is way too palpable, and “Code Geass” speaks only of a fictional empire, but you know it is actually about de-colonization independence movements, so does this movie only speak in historical riddles, yet they are deciphered as the change of a way of life in Europe slowly covered in dark by dictatorships which plunged it into World War II. The characters are just archetypes, the story itself is petty, but their combined symbolism is the key to understanding Wes Anderson’s vision. You need to know how to watch this film. The only thing it matters is how this film is directed. While “Rushmore” was Anderson’s meditation on the craziness of youth, “The Grand Budapest Hotel” is a contemplation about decay and the passage of time. He tackles war only indirectly, using the flamboyant Gustave (excellent and charming Ralph Fiennes, who even physically resembles Stefan Zweig, whose writings inspired the story) as a synecdoche for cosmopolitan pacifists who became extinct in the era of violent (ideological) exclusionists. War is in the background, only its effects visible: it shows the shift in the mentality of a society, from respect and intellect during peacetime to agressive behavior and unchecked selfishness during war, embodied in Dmitri’s family during the inheritance battle ("When the destiny of a great fortune is at stake, men's greed spreads like a poison in the bloodstream..."), where he now thinks that might is right, that the strong ones can take whatever they want, just as a foreign country is about to annex Zubrowka. Dmitri's killer Joplin is practically an intruder in the film, untypically violent for an Anderson film, but that was the point: to depict how these anatagonists are wrecking the humorous idyll. Among others, lawyer Kovacs (Jeff Goldblum) and Serge’s sister with the club foot are killed (Kovacs' four fingers amputated by a door, later included into a gag of four of his fingerprints missing in a police file report), who could be seen as an allegory for the fate of Jews and the handicapped during World War II.
Some situations are iconic. Kovacs reluctantly picking up his dead cat he left at the coat check. A prison guard has no heart to stab Mendl’s beautiful cake, which contains escape tools inside, so he just let’s it through into Gustave’s cell, unchecked. Gustave, after escaping from prison, uses his connections to make a phone call to the Society of Crossed Keyes, an interwoven guild of hotel concierges, so his friend M. Ivan (Bill Murray), who is there to always bail him out when needed, arranges to pick up Gustave in a car, prepare a train ride and locates Serge for him. Agatha hanging from a roof gutter, Zero wants to save her, but just falls down and clings on to the same roof gutter, which now collapses from their double weight. Subliminal images will stay in your head for a long time, such as Gustave entering the frame from the left, into the titles saying “1 9 3 2”, or Dmitri’s relatives gasping when they hear that Madame D. left a valuable painting to Gustave, so the camera pans to him taking a step forward with his hand raised, saying: “I’m afraid that's me, darling”. The elegant way the narrator's voice "invisibly" changes from old (in 1 9 8 5) to young (in the 1 9 6 8 segment). Madame D. may even be a symbol of ancient cultural heritage of the country, which Gustave courts, unwilling to let go to live in his own time. "The Grand Budapest Hotel" once again embodies Anderson's directing: overwhelming stylization, underwhelming storyline and characters. The whole film is meticulously designed, framed and set up, with an inner-directing skill of switching the aspect ratios between 1.33:1, 1.85:1 and 2.35:1—depending on each timeline—since it is a story-within-a-story-within-a-story, starting from a girl reading the title novel about a writer who meets concierge Zero who finally tells the tale of the hotel, and thus the hotel segment has the most narrow aspect ratio—it is so far back in history, it is only a distant memory. However, just like Tarantino and Godard, Anderson is either unwilling or unable to insert any real life pathos into his (later) stories, and as such all the characters seem synthetic—almost as if the director just assembled all his previous actors, from Wilson to Schwartzman, because he felt it was his duty to have them there, and not because they have a greater function in the overcrowded story—and some of his dialogues tend to sound too ponderous, which ultimately extended the artificiality of the fictional hotel to every atom of this autistic film, which may not be for everyone's taste.
Grade:+++
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