The Grand Budapest Hotel

Wes Anderson’s new feature film ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’ hit theaters this past week, drawing audiences and critics with its distinctive Anderson-Aesthetic brand of comedy. At this point, many filmgoers know what to expect from an Anderson film, as the director’s cult popularity has gradually introduced his style into the popular consciousness. While the director’s films may explore new plots, sets, characters and colors, audiences understand that they are unlikely to plunge into truly unknown territory, instead embroidering on familiar themes and landscapes. Anderson’s cinematic storytelling often expands on a certain aesthetic theme, with Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums and the Life Aquatic centering in turn on the structures of a high school, a tenement house, and a submarine. In a similar vein, Anderson’s new film centers on a hotel. The ‘Grand Budapest Hotel’ operates against a painted mountainous background in the fictional Republic of Zubrowka. Depicted in a juxtaposition of flashbacks to a sumptuous golden age and present day decline, ‘Zubrowka’ evokes political sentimentality reminiscent of the declining Ottoman empire – or maybe of any degenerating empire.

Jude Law plays a writer on a stay at a drab and tacky version of the hotel in the 1960s, who makes the acquaintance of the proprietor of the hotel, Mr. Zero Moustafa. Moustafa relates to the writer his early history at the hotel, working as a lobby boy under the tutelage of socialite/concierge Mr. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes), whose flighty mannerisms, almost moral emphasis on décor, and sexual exploits dominate the rest of the film. Gustave’s vociferous love affairs with the hotel’s elderly female patrons intertwine him – and by extension, Zero – in an intrigue involving a noble family, a disputed inheritance and an ominous hitman. The exploits that ensue are often slapstick, particularly in a rollicking prison break and chase scene that culminates in a Marx Brothers-esque gunfight. However, the film’s bright colors and adventurous spirit are framed by an inescapable sense of loss. Old Moustafa admits that he cannot even reminisce about his young love Agatha (Saoirse Ronan) without crying, while terse, tacky style of the 1960s set reminds us that the past has been lost to war, ideology and institutionalization. Zubrowka may be fictional, but the shadow of war hovers over the end of the Grand Budapest’s glory days with a familiarly foreboding tenseness of militarization, secret police and border inspections – while the sense of oppression encasing the decrepit 1960s Budapest feels familiar as well. In Grand Budapest, Anderson uses his refined sense of aesthetic design to illuminate an arc of glory, war and repression that feels both familiar and timeless.