Tuesday, June 10, 2014

La Femme Recommends…The Grand Budapest Hotel

La Femme Julie Presents:  The Grand Budapest Hotel, a review in Four Parts.  (Indulge me, this is my homage to Wes Anderson, cute, quirky, twee and hopefully only slightly cloying.)



Part 1: In which the machinations of the plot are discussed.

The Grand Budapest Hotel is a Matryoshka doll of a film, a story, within a story, within a story.  The film begins with an aged Author (Tom Wilkinson) introducing the story and his younger self (Jude Law).  The Young Writer (that is the character name, is it too twee or just right? )  is a guest at a formerly renowned hotel, now an ugly communist run palace, in the fictional land of Zubrowka, a tiny, much invaded country.  There the Young Writer meets the mysterious owner of the hotel, Mr. Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham), who invites him to dinner to tell him the story of how he came to own The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Much of Mr. Moustafa's story focuses on his mentor, the former manager of the hotel, Monsieur Gustave, played with gusto by a lovely Ralph Fiennes.  M. Gustave has the habit of doting on and sleeping with the elderly women who stay at the hotel, he takes this duty as a  very important and sacred part of his job as a concierge.   M. Gustave's most recent conquest, a wonderfully made-up Tilda Swinton, is found dead, and foul play is suspected.  When her will is read and and she leaves her lover a priceless painting, "Boy with Apple, and M. Gustave finds himself accused of murder. Knowing that he will never get the painting, Mr. Moustafa encourages him to steal it and replaces it with a lewd pornographic painting in the estate (one of the best gags of the film is how long it takes the "grieving" family to notice their prized possession is gone).  What happens next include: pastry, ski lifts, a secret society, but also, a dead cat, severed fingers and an the ominous cloud of world war.


 Part 2: In which the cast of characters are lauded.


Fiennes is dignified, deathly serious and terribly funny, he brings an old fashioned feel to the character of M. Gustave.  Gustave is snobbish but also able to fit in to almost any situation, but instead of making him too much of an enigma, Fiennes fills him with a humanism that is sometimes missing from Anderon's characters.  He has the poignancy that this soon to be relic of an earlier time, needs as well as the light handed touch that a character this silly needs.  The enormous cast can't go unmentioned: a cavalcade of actors that are beloved by me, at least.  Jeff Goldblum as the very moral lawyer, Mathieu Almaric (mon boo!) as Serge X, a servant caught in the middle of the investigation, Wilem Defoe at his most menacing as a unrelenting heavy and Sariose Ronan as Mr. Moustafa's love interest, a pastry chef with a birthmark the shape of Mexico. I also loved Edward Norton, Harvey Keitel, Adrien Brody, etc. The list could go on.  Newcomer Tony Revolori is delightful as the young Zero Moustafa and while he does have some of the quirks of some of the traditional Anderson characters, particularly the young ones, he is winning and funny as the lobby boy hero.  I did find some of the cameos later in the film to be a little distracting but also a lot of fun. I won't spoil them here.

Part 3: In which the mise en scene of the auteur is analyzed.




The sets are gorgeous: whimsical, over the top and amazingly detailed but not to the point of distraction as it can be in some of his other films.  Instead they fit the opulent and bygone world depicted in the film.  Anderson has always had a razor like focus into his own worlds, nothing seems to exist outside of the characters and the same is true here, but the scope is so much bigger that I think it works a bit better.    I loved a lot of the sight gags (the painting above) and the light handed Lubitsch touch that he brought to the film.  So  many times I think Anderson can wear his influences on his sleeve and veer too much into homage but in The Grand Budapest Hotel the movie felt like it could be a Lubitsch comedy, mixing romance and drama and world war all at once. The presence of a dark cloud over this candy covered world made the film seem more mature and overall it had more pathos than any of Anderon's previous films.

Part 4: In which the themes of the film are investigated.




What shocked me most about The Grand Budapest Hotel were the themes that I saw Anderson working with: nostalgia, always, but in this film it was nostalgia for something that wasn't just fading away like the Tannenbaum's home or the summer in Moonrise Kingdom.  Instead it was something, a whole way of life that was about to be wiped out.  This film featured shocking (well for Anderson)  moments of violence, not realistic or over the top, but nevertheless, jarring and fresh. The palpable sense sense of foreboding and dread, throughout all eras of the film worked so well for me.  For example: twice, once at the beginning and once at the end Mr. Moustafa and M. Gustave are stopped at a border crossing and both times there is a palpable sense of fear.  The first time the Lubitsch touch works and M. Gustave's world keeps going.  The second time the outcome is much much different.  War is coming to this tiny country and although we don't see it, we feel it.  The world is changing and it can't go back to the world of M. Gustave.  Along we Anderson we mourn powder pink hotels, lobby boys and dapper mustachioed concierges who know how to make every guest feel like royalty.

Julie