The Grand Budapest Hotel
Produced by Scott Rudin Productions and Studio Babelsberg
Directed and written by Wes Anderson
Distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures

 

Exceptionally well-made pastries are often said to be lighter than air.  I was reminded of this after watching Wes Anderson’s latest film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, a confection so airy that the slightest touch of critical scrutiny will likely send it wafting into clouds of Hungarian cream scudding above our heads.  With this in mind, I’ll try to tether my remarks to terra firma.

Anderson makes sure we don’t for a moment think his narrative is earthbound.  It’s studiously artificial, despite taking place against what Monsieur Gustave (an hilariously mannered Ralph Fiennes) refers to as “this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity.”  In stark contrast to this slaughterhouse, in the foreground we see a pink hotel painted on pasteboard, looking exactly like a frosted cake.  It’s a stylized version of European charm between the wars, charm that now seems hopelessly frivolous, given the 150 or so million who died as a result of those heroic engagements.

The film takes place principally in 1932, so the slaughter has ebbed for the moment in Hungary—just a few murders and the occasional punch-up, most of them happening off-screen.  But more slaughter is coming.  It will wreck the delicate world we see before us, the one composed of pastel pastries, mountain-top hotels approached by funicular railways, candlelit dinners presided over by waitstaff dressed in royal purple, and concierge desks and elevator interiors lacquered in glistening red.  In short, everything that’s meant by the phrase Old World charm, a charm that depended on an enormously wealthy upper class who provided respectful servants their livings, built and supported traditional architecture, and hired the craftsmen who tended to their needs.  All this was being stomped to pieces by the rise of the totalitarian state.

For reasons undisclosed, Anderson has chosen not to introduce the real thing.  Although much of the story takes place in a fictional alpine state he’s named Zubrowka, first in 1932 and later in 1968, there are no Nazis or communists to be seen.  Instead, we have gray-uniformed soldiers who wear double Zs on their sleeves and politely keeping their Heils to themselves; later, instead of communists, we’re confronted by bitter men walking about the hotel’s once-tiled halls, now covered in polyurethaned plywood, their self-importance belied by their drab, poorly tailored suits.

As much as this is a story about the earlier 20th century, it’s also one concerning the evolution of film.  This is signaled by the changing aspect ratios as the story unreels back and forth through three time frames: full widescreen for the present, middle for 1968, and what was once the conventional 4:3 ratio for the 1930’s, in which most of the action takes place.  There’s even a brief black-and-white segment on a train, a favored location in the films of the 30’s and 40’s.  Anderson makes no bones about it: His film is a deliberately artificial tribute to earlier directors, especially the droll and bittersweet Ernst Lubitsch, who specialized in romance and its misunderstandings in a fading world.

We first meet M. Gustave as he is smoothly averting a romantic misunderstanding.  He’s consoling the countess Madame D. (Tilda Swinton, under a few pounds of latex to give her necessary seniority), one of his several aged paramours.  She is about to leave the Grand Budapest, reluctantly as it happens, and Gustave is determined she do so in the afterglow of his warmest attention.  He assures her of his devotion even as he hurries her along.  Still, he can’t help being startled by her nail polish.  He pronounces it physically repulsive.

As Fiennes plays the part, Gustave has the body language and locutions generally associated with homosexuals.  My homosexual friends used to call this swish, but I suppose we’re not allowed that word any longer.  Not only does Gustave express horror at unseemly nail polish, he regularly mists himself with L’Air de Panache cologne, addresses men and women alike as Darling, and admires the rejuvenating effects of the skin cream applied to Madame D. after she’s embalmed.  And yet his various affectations are not necessarily homosexual.  As far as we know he never touches Zero Moustafa, his new lobby boy (wonderfully played by newcomer Tony Revolori).  Instead, he forges a paternal relationship with the lad, troubled only by his evident attraction to Agatha (Saorise Ronan), the young man’s fiancée.  Besides, Gustave proves himself quite heterosexually active with ladies of a certain age, which for him seems to be exclusively above 70.  Of Madame D., he declares that she was “dynamite in the sack.”  When Zero incredulously remarks, “She was 84,” Gustave replies airily, “I’ve had older.”

Gustave’s erotic attention to aged biddies is clearly a nostalgic effort.  He’s determined to keep the humane elegance of the past alive.  With the hindsight of 2014, who can blame him?

In the film’s second half, the plot takes off into the madcap, inventive, and always hilarious cinema of Buster Keaton and Preston Sturges.  Madame D. has left Gustave a priceless 16th-century painting entitled Boy With Apple, featuring a ten-year-old holding the fruit tentatively in a clawlike hand as if he were contemplating the Original Sin.  This sparks members of the countess’s impossibly extended family to plot Gustave’s removal.  He’s promptly jailed for her murder.  In prison, he puts his ingratiating ways to work cultivating the most hardened convicts, including Harvey Keitel, who has never looked less human.  While somewhat predictable, the rest of the film has its surprises, including what must be the most providential deployment of pastries ever put on film.

What we have in The Grand Budapest Hotel is a frankly nostalgic vision of a genteel world lost to stupidity and savagery.  Did it ever exist?  Of course it did.  And it continues to beguile us in Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be and Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels.  We give up our belief in these visions at our peril.  Anderson credits Stefan Zweig as his inspiration.  Although I’ve not read his work, I understand he also was aghast at the course of the 20th century.  He was an Austrian Jew who loved the culture of the West, and when he had become convinced it was being irremediably trashed by modernity, he and his wife took their lives in 1942.  Anderson’s film may be playful, but it’s undergirded by a genuine sense of the tragic.