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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Film Review | The Grand Budapest Hotel
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Film Review | The Grand Budapest Hotel

Tragic, hilarious and exhilaratingthere couldn't be a more perfect Wes Anderson film

‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’ is Wes Anderson’s first major film with an explicit historical canvas—the inter-war years of Europe in the 1930s.Premium
‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’ is Wes Anderson’s first major film with an explicit historical canvas—the inter-war years of Europe in the 1930s.

It is easy to miss the politics and historicity of Wes Anderson’s cinema. He’s a director obsessed with production design, fantastical settings, make-up and costumes rather than the gradual psychological unfolding of characters, and most of his films have a much too cleverly orchestrated blueprint. He could be bringing old fairy-tale books with intricately sketched scenes alive on screen.

The animated look can be deceptive. Anderson’s best films are not what they seem. The teenage love story Moonrise Kingdom (2012) is really about the emotional ruin of adults. Similarly, his new film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, is as much the caper as it is a look at the perplexing effects of war on an old, venerated culture. This is the director’s first major film with an explicit historical canvas—the inter-war years of Europe in the 1930s.

Three narratives unfold. A writer (Jude Law) arrives at the Grand Budapest Hotel in the fictional town of Zubrowka. Once a repository of secret love, decadent desserts and other such luxuries, orange carpets and a downbeat air now plaster the hotel’s lobby. A bearded lonely man, Zero Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham), who happens to own this grand detritus, catches the writer’s fancy—and he narrates his personal history, which is also the history of the hotel, that resembled a gigantic and intricate dollhouse in its heyday.

The young Zero (Anthony Quinonez, who extracts enough deadpan humour from the role), an immigrant, joined the Budapest Hotel as a lobby boy under M. Gustave, the concierge manager. If not the protagonist, Gustave (Ralph Fiennes in one of his best roles) is certainly the film’s central force.
The family of a deceased lady (Tilda Swinton) with a sprawling estate, who wills Gustave a painting, is out to kill him, but what seems to threaten Gustave more is the order of the new post-war society, far from his own. He has a cultivated English polish which slips up rarely but tellingly when it does. A man of petty hypocrisies, a love of romantic poetry (a book collection of those is pretty much what he would leave behind if he were to die), he is generous to a fault and is lover to rich, ageing, “needy" ladies. He is fiercely protective of Zero. After Zero and Gustave steal the painting, we find Gustave bruised and plotting in jail, and both mentor and protégé moving towards a predictable end.

The film’s cast includes Adrien Brody, Tom Wilkinson, Edward Norton, Bill Murray and Jeff Goldblum, falling into perfect little eccentric squares in this scheme revolving around the affairs of Gustave, Grand Budapest’s most important man.

The relationship between Zero and Gustave is a delightful study in culture clash. No two characters could be more different in upbringing, physical attributes and temperament. Anderson completely subverts the master-slave, white-brown equation of the era by making both characters relevant only in the time and place we see them in. Is Moustafa Arab or Jewish? Has Gustave risen through the ranks at the hotel? Where in Europe is he from and where is his family?

Both are nobodies in a historical sense, but have enough import because they are so inextricably linked to their present. The present has meaning because of the objects, food and furniture around them, all gorgeous and quaint at the same time. Anderson views nostalgia in extremely sensuous ways.

Robert D. Yeoman’s cinematography livens up the crafty production design by Adam Stockhausen and art direction by Stephan O. Gessler, Gerald Sullivan and

Steve Summersgill. The Grand Budapest Hotel is like meticulously designed and gorgeously filmed puppet theatre. The wit in Anderson’s screenplay sparkles in his droll way, and the overall zaniness and visual splendour are thrilling to watch on the big screen.

The Grand Budapest Hotel releases in theatres on Friday.

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Published: 24 Jul 2014, 04:43 PM IST
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