Wryly Humorous Evocation of a Bygone Era

Rating: 9/10 (16 July 2014)

THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL is one of the best films I have seen in recent times. On the surface it is a comedy stuffed full of brilliant one-liners: Ralph Fiennes, as the concierge M. Gustave, gets the chance to play comedy, something he actually does very well. The plot is a picaresque combination of the absurd and the entertaining; I particularly enjoyed the prison-break sequence through the sewers, spearheaded by chief convict Ludwig (Harvey Keitel), and the climactic sequence where Gustave and his sworn enemy Dımitri (Adrien Brody) become involved in a shooting-match in the hotel, where everyone seems to be firing at everyone else with no real sense of purpose. Yet Wes Anderson's film is also an elegy for a vanished way of life; that bourgeois European world of dowagers and countesses, whose indiscretions would be carefully hidden from public view by discreet concierges like Gustave. The settings are quite breathtaking in their grandioseness; the Budapest hotel, with its profusion of exterior windows and restrained pink interiors, the dining-room covered with a blood-red carpet, and the lobby full of pillars, evokes a world of opulence and style. Together with cinematographer Robert Yeoman, Anderson evokes a world of precise geometric shapes - the rectangular pillars set against the rhombuses of the troops; the precise arches of the door-frames and the exquisitely placed dining-tables, turning the hotel dining-room into something resembling an examination hall in a school. The impression communicated is one of a world precisely ordered, both architecturally and socially - which is completely destroyed by military interventions. When the young writer (Jude Law) visits the hotel much later, and encounters the elderly Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham), the building is on its last legs, a remnant of a vanished world. Hence the film's last sequences assume a poignant tone, especially when we learn what happened to Gustave. Based on material by the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig (1881-1942), who was forced out of Germany on Adolf Hitler's coming to power, THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL is an elegy for a world blown apart by military invention. Highly recommended.