Roiling with laughter

Rating: Null/10 (12 April 2014)

Nothing to brag about but a real entertaining and grotesque imbroglio in a deluxe hotel in some eastern European mountains in an in-between time after something and before something else without any precision on the nature of the one or the other. Delirium Hollywoodens with a big touch of English humor on the basis of Stefan Zweig's unsmiling and undisturbed sarcastic irony on the great fall of the very old Holy Germanic Empire, of the less old Austro-Hungarian empire and even of the quiet still recent Prussian Reich à la Bismarck, hence the big grin of the one who knows the Germans and many others in Eastern Europe will have to compensate their frustrations and their disappeared dreams of power with some kind of military adventure, a war, my dear, a war forever and for our happiness when it stops.
And the supreme irony is that the heir to all that lost glory, embodied in the Grand Budapest Hotel, decaying and slowly dying, is a certain Moustafa, a survivor and descendant of the Ottoman Empire, a stateless and country-less wanderer across borders, times and places. The extreme incognito persona non grata who controls everything that is slowly going down into the hell of a future that has no predictable nature.
The film becomes then the vision of a hollow world seen by hollow men like the same ones by T.S. Eliot. The vision of time going without knowing where and everything, everyone managed and led by no one knows who, and we can even guess that those who have the power to make the world do this or that don't even know they have that power and if they knew they would not know what they would like the world to do.
The world is a stuttering surviving corpse who has been abandoned on the road shoulder and forgotten on the way to the cemetery, Stephen King's Pet Sematary of course, since we are all animals doomed to come back over and over again into that trashy world and that swampy life.
Apart from that, the war between the super rich heirs who are dispossessed by the dead one and the super servile poor concierge who is the benefactor of this dispossession, becomes the war between two worlds, and after that war the empire of the rich had become the empire of the concierge who had been killed in the meantime and had willed everything to his Lobby Boy who moves from a Zero identification to a Moustafa name with a full beard and total secrecy about his person. And then at the end of that transitory period we have a hint that the world has changed, that the super rich have disappeared and have been dispossessed by the community in some kind of communism without the name and that Moustafa has managed to keep his dying hotel as a compensation of the requisition or is it nationalization of all his possessions? Some say that making the rich poor might make the poor rich.
Then the rest is farce and ludicrous clownish buffoonery. Enjoy it, particularly the winter games' challenge in the snow on a sledge with no brake and no driving device. Have a stop at this prankster's antic and you may easily accept that the world we live in is maybe not so bad after all and in spite of all its incoherent nonsensical trickster's absurdity.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU