Sachertorte and Strychnine

Rating: 7/10 (15 April 2015)

Despite its title, "The Grand Budapest Hotel" is not actually set in Hungary. The film was shot in Germany, but the titular hotel is supposedly located in the fictional Central European Republic of Zubrowka. (Zubrowka? I remember drinking some when I was in Gdansk). The story, an original one but said to be inspired by the works of the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, is told using a complex "framework technique". (A particularly Germanic literary device; even in English it is sometimes known by the German name of "Rahmentechnik"). In 1985 a character known only as The Author relates a story told to him in 1968 by the hotel's owner, one Zero Mustafa. Zero's story relates to his own experiences as a young man in the 1930s. He arrived in Zubrowka as a refugee from his own war-torn Middle Eastern homeland and found employment as a lobby boy at the Grand Budapest Hotel, where the hotel concierge, Monsieur Gustave, took him under his wing as his protégé.
Their lives were changed for ever when regular guest at the hotel, Madame Céline Villeneuve Desgoffe und Taxis, died, leaving Gustave a valuable painting in her will. Her family were most unhappy with this development, especially her son Dimitri Villeneuve Desgoffe und Taxis, and did all they could to prevent Gustave from receiving his legacy. (Zubrowka seems to be an ethnically mixed society; local names are an odd mixture of French, German and Slavic). It transpired that Céline had died of poisoning, and Gustave was arrested, thrown in jail and charged with the crime. The rest of the film deals with Gustave's efforts to escape and clear his name with the assistance of Zero, Zero's girlfriend Agatha and other friends.
I was pleasantly surprised by Ralph Fiennes in the key role of Gustave. I have in the past been impressed by Fiennes as a serious actor, especially in villainous or unsympathetic roles such as the Nazi Commandant in "Schindler's List", Lord Voldemort in the "Harry Potter" series and the Duke of Devonshire in "The Duchess", but I never suspected that he had the comedic skills or lightness of touch necessary for something like this. The film also stars a galaxy of big-name actors from both sides of the Atlantic, some of them such as Jude Law, Willem Dafoe and Harvey Keitel only appearing in minor roles.
Although the dialogue is in English, the film struck me as having more in common with a continental European art-house movie than with a typical production of the American or British cinema. It therefore came as no surprise to discover that although it is officially an American-German- British co-production, features a number of American and British actors and was made by an American director, Wes Anderson, it was financed by German financial companies and film-funding organisations. It is an odd mixture of Sachertorte and strychnine, a Viennese operetta with a libretto by Agatha Christie and made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock. The name of Zero's girlfriend may have been a nod in the direction of the Queen of Crime, and the film's central theme, that of a man wrongly accused of a crime, is classically Hitchcockian. This theme, however, is not treated entirely seriously but rather in the manner of an archly cynical black comedy. The acting is mannered and highly stylised and the sets are both opulent, conjuring up a sense of late Victorian or Edwardian luxury, even though the action ostensibly takes place in 1932, and unrealistic, perhaps suggesting that there was something unreal about the luxury which they symbolise.
This sort of thing can be a highly acquired taste, but I must admit that I enjoyed it. Anderson and his cast, especially Fiennes, do enough to ensure that a film could easily have become horribly frivolous, or horribly boring, or both, remains entertaining throughout. It may be a fantasy set in an imaginary Ruritanian country named after a brand of Polish vodka, yet it never loses touch with reality entirely. The scenes of Gustave's wrongful arrest and the scenes towards the end when Zubrowka is preparing for war forcibly remind us that real life in twentieth-century Mitteleuropa was far from being a Ruritanian idyll. 7/10