The Grand Budapest Hotel

Wes Ander­son made a cred­it card com­mer­cial back in 2004 in which he satirised the jod­phur-sport­ing, bull-horn wield­ing auto­crat that forms our roman­tic con­cep­tion of what a film direc­tor is and how he/​she oper­ates. Ander­son him­self starred in the amus­ing short and is seen sashay­ing around a movie set as toad­y­ing flunkies fall at his feet so that he may per­son­al­ly anoint their cre­ative proposals.

This motif – the sin­gle hero­ic fig­ure flanked by his loy­al charges – has since appeared in The Fan­tas­tic Mr Fox, Moon­rise King­dom and now forms the ide­o­log­i­cal core for his pre­dictably delight­ful new work, The Grand Budapest Hotel. We may have inferred spu­ri­ous behav­iour­al sim­i­lar­i­ties between Max Fis­ch­er, Roy­al Ten­nen­baum or Steve Zis­sou in the direc­tor him­self – char­ac­ters as an exten­sion of the creator’s per­son­al­i­ty, as the auteurists would have it – yet this lat­est work appears whol­ly obsessed with the mechan­ics and logis­tics of Anderson’s expe­ri­ence writ­ing and direct­ing movies.

The film is a fleet-foot­ed, ultra ornate mit­tel-Euro­pean caper with all retro fit­tings in place and bursts of car­toon­ish macabre fill­ing in where the Mar­ti­ni dry humour once was. And here the gen­teel, syl­la­ble-heavy olde world dia­logue is writ­ten to dove­tail with the cus­tom­ar­i­ly metic­u­lous pro­duc­tion design and Robert Yeoman’s snow­globe fram­ing. The cin­e­mat­ic ref­er­ence points range from Lubitsch, Mur­nau, Von Stern­berg and famed Ger­man sil­hou­ette ani­ma­tor, Lotte Reiniger, right through to Kubrick (par­tic­u­lar­ly The Shin­ing), while the film is said to be pri­mar­i­ly inspired by the writ­ings of Aus­tri­an lit­er­ary styl­ist, Ste­fan Zweig. The del­i­cate word­play in the script feels, if not pur­loined from Zweig’s pages, then cer­tain­ly stu­dious­ly and fond­ly recal­i­brat­ed for the big screen with Anderson’s cus­tom­ary reverence.

Sub­tle pangs of melan­choly – that Ander­son sta­ple – per­me­ate every immac­u­late frame, even as the film’s plot bar­rels along at a more sprite­ly pace than usu­al. This melan­choly arrives in its open­ing frames when a young woman hangs a hotel key on a bust/​memorial and begins read­ing from a hard­back enti­tled ​‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’.

Once we are two, three lay­ers and two aspect ratios removed from con­tem­po­rary real­i­ty (or Anderson’s slight­ly less geo­met­ri­cal­ly pre­cise vision of con­tem­po­rary real­i­ty), we are intro­duced to the world of this baroque moun­tain­top spa hotel, lord­ed over by the obscene­ly devot­ed and motor-mouthed concierge M Gus­tave (Ralph Fiennes) and his pencil-mostachio’d lob­by boy-cum-pro­tégé, Zero (Tony Revolori).

If Gus­tave – bark­ing orders, main­tain­ing stan­dards, hold­ing the future of the estab­lish­ment in the palm of his hand – is the Ander­son man­qué, then the epony­mous grand hotel stands in for his idio­syn­crat­ic brand of cin­e­ma. He doesn’t so much have sup­port­ing play­ers in the film as he does an extend­ed fam­i­ly of cher­ished guests who he invites to stay for a while, relax and soak up the ambi­ence: French it girl Léa Sey­doux has a part as a maid which may as well be non-speak­ing; Owen Wil­son plays one of M Gustave’s concierge brethren and gets a line (if not a laugh); even Til­da Swin­ton makes a fly­ing vis­it to Wesworld, caked in gristly pros­thet­ics as an age­ing dowa­ger who drops dead after her first and only scene, her pass­ing act­ing as deus ex machi­na for an elab­o­rate art heist involv­ing the where­abouts of the apoc­ryphal, price­less chef d’oeuvre, ​‘Boy With Apple’.

Although the mur­mur­ings of Euro­pean con­flict can be heard in the back­drop of all the cross-coun­try caper­ing, Ander­son co-opts the period’s social rather than polit­i­cal detail. Accent-wise, Fiennes does a loqua­cious spin on his Eng­lish Patient but pep­pered with bizarre Amer­i­can­isms (god­damn!) and fruity sign-offs (dar­ling).

The bad­dies of the piece, broth­ers Dmitri (Adrien Brody) and Jopling (Willem Dafoe, replete with Max Schreck-style low­er-jaw fangs), have a mild ger­man­ic lilt, while there is French dia­logue from Sey­doux and Math­ieu Amal­ric. Saoirse Ronan (as Zero’s pas­try-chef fiancé with facial scar) retains a North­ern Irish twang. This geo­graph­i­cal melt­ing pot helps to main­tain a sense of fan­tas­ti­cal dis­tance, remind­ing us con­stant­ly that a movie is a whim­si­cal fab­ri­ca­tion of real­i­ty – and that we are watch­ing a movie.

Ander­son often prizes in-the-moment emo­tion over con­trived dra­ma, though with this film you feel that tricks are some­times being missed. There is a mys­tery ele­ment to the plot – Who’s got the paint­ing? Where’s the sec­ond will? How will Gus­tave break out of jail? – though Ander­son always opts for telling you how some­thing is going to hap­pen first, allow­ing you to watch and soak up the rich aes­thet­ic detail.

A sequence in which the fam­i­ly lawyer, Kovacs (Jeff Gold­blum), is being chased around an art gallery by a knife-wield­ing Jopling, his fate seems pre-des­tined, a fore­gone con­clu­sion. It’s not will this hap­pen, it’s how will this hap­pen. The frame is there as much to show as it is to con­ceal, and one won­ders if the film could not have been super­charged by sim­ply allow­ing a few blank spaces for the audi­ence to fill. But then with Ander­son the process is the sto­ry and the details are the drama.

Even though from the out­set The Grand Budapest Hotel announces itself as a jol­ly tri­fle, its cumu­la­tive pow­er catch­es you day­dream­ing. Ander­son has this innate abil­i­ty to shoot a moment through with intense sad­ness through a rep­e­ti­tion, a real­i­sa­tion or a tonal remove. The finale of the sto­ry is large­ly upbeat, but then we are back dragged back through time, through lit­er­ary devices, through nar­ra­tors, inter­pre­ta­tions and dream­worlds and back into the snow-swept real­i­ty of the girl stood alone, clutch­ing the hotel key. This sad­ness derives not from the fact that the sto­ry has come to an end, but that it was all just a sto­ry in the first place.