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An enthralling and suspenseful yarn in the director’s signature style.
The Grand Budapest Hotel
THE Grand Budapest, “an enchanting old ruin” as we are told, is a coral-pink castle sitting forlornly atop a mountain in the frostbitten Republic of Zubrowka. Secreted among the alpine heights of this fictional alcove of Eastern Europe, the hotel, not unlike The Overlook in Kubrick’s The Shining, has generations of mystery folded within its rooms. It is itself an invitation to the speculative realms of the imagination.
At the thresholds of the hotel, we are introduced to several playful orders of narrative: flashbacks-within-flashbacks, and tales of romance and suspense that arc over the uncomfortable history of the mid-20th century. In the 1980s, a young author (Jude Law) finds himself sitting among the semi-splendour of the hotel, its extravagance having fallen into decline, where he meets the hotel’s enigmatic owner, Mr Moustafa (F Murray Abraham). Over dinner, the proprietor tells him the impossibly quirky story of how the hotel came into his possession.
Moustafa began as a young lobby boy at the hotel in 1932, protégé to the eccentric concierge, Monsieur Gustave (Ralph Fiennes). Gustave organises the hotel with a half-deranged sense of efficiency, which perfectly matches director Wes Anderson’s meticulously calibrated sense of timing.
Gustave seems to represent, as he himself speaks of, a “glimmer of civilisation in the barbaric slaughterhouse we know as humanity.” His life hangs somewhere between order and Caligulan excess: his modest appearance conceals his monstrous appetite for romancing the hotel’s elderly, blonde bourgeoisie.
Upon the death of Madame D, one of his many former affairs, Gustave finds himself in the midst of a familial turmoil over the division of her estate. Her son, Dmitri Desgoffe-und-Taxis (Adrien Brody), fearing the loss of inheritance to this foreigner, sends Gustave on a cartwheeling adventure of false murder charges, incarceration and redemption.
Grand Budapest has the childish feel of a pop-up book (or a game of Cluedo), its images so perfectly composed, springing up at you like delightful cardboard cutouts. Each character’s clutch of idiosyncrasies is pushed to its maximal point: there’s Gustave with his impeccable scarlet-rimmed lapels; Dmitri with a thin, thunderstruck lash of moustache; and the assassin Jopling (Willem Dafoe), heavy eyes brushed with kohl and two-toothed Transylvanian mouth. This is a world of shimmering surfaces in which historical tragedy and existential wounding, even death itself, become emptied-out of their meaning, re-imagined in a splendid, bursting palette to join the circus of cinematic thrills.
If this film is a nostalgic evocation of “old Europe”, a vanished world of aesthetic delights, it is one refracted through Anderson’s hipster prism, his utterly distinct sensibilities. It becomes less a treatment of majesty holding out against a soul-gurgling modernity, than a tribute to the director himself. Anderson has mas-
‘Old Europe’, refracted through Anderson’s hipster prism
tered his visual armoury: scenes composed like claustrophobic chocolate boxes, low-lurking camera swoops and an elegant script in which language often does a comic plunge from the poetic to the foulmouthed.
But this is a minor murmur of discontent, because so enthralling and suspenseful is this yarn that we can almost forgive history’s postmodern fate, or the sense that tragedy is a mere stylistic shadow against which the film makes brighter the warmth of its illusions.
Of course, those tired of Anderson’s signature whimsy will find little to persuade them. For the rest, Grand Budapest will triumph in the cartoony, two-dimensional charms the director played with in Fantastic Mr Fox and Moonrise Kingdom. Journeying through blistering storms, artfully arranging its laughter and tension, this is pure adventure which howls in the face of disaster.