Wes Anderson's THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL recounts the
adventures of Gustave H, a legendary concierge at a famous European hotel
between the wars, and Zero Moustafa, the lobby boy who becomes his most trusted
friend.
The Grand Budapest Hotel: Berlin 2014 – first look review
Wes Anderson's new film
adapts the spirit of Stefan Zweig into a Ruritanian picaresque stuffed full of
bizarre character studies
Andrew Pulver
theguardian.com, Thursday 6 February 2014 / http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/feb/06/grand-budapest-hotel-review-berlin-2014-wes-anderson
Whatever the patchiness of the rest of its lineup, the
Berlin film festival tends to start off with a bang, and this year is no
exception: the world premiere of the new film from Wes Anderson, that master of
archly sculpted dialogue and meticulous, retrofitted design. The arrival of The
Grand Budapest Hotel is particularly appropriate, for this is the moment in the
Anderson oeuvre when he turns to consider all things Mitteleuropäische –
refracted, as a closing credit tells us, through the work of the prolific
Austrian writer Stefan Zweig.
Zweig specialised in novellas – Letter from an Unknown
Woman, Fear, The Royal Game – normally designed to illuminate some plangent
melodrama in interwar Vienna. Without being a direct adaptation of anything
specific, The Grand Budapest Hotel distils many of the story's elements.
Anderson has concocted what is essentially a Ruritanian picaresque, stuffed
full of bizarre character studies, and fashioned with his, by now familiar,
handcrafted attention to detail. In fact, like much of Anderson's work, you get
the feeling many of the scenes have been lifted directly from a sketchbook;
certain sequences here are animated with little discernible effect on the
general sensibility.
The central figure in the film is one Gustave H (Ralph
Fiennes, on mercurial form), the concierge of the eponymous hotel, which is
located not in Ruritania but an equally fictitious principality called
Zubrowka. Gustave's activities are relayed to us via the very Zweig-esque
device of an itinerant novelist (Jude Law) encountering the hotel's mysterious
owner, one Zero Moustafa (F Murray Abraham, playing the rich, sonorous tones
card for all it's worth), who unburdens himself of his childhood stint as a
lobby boy back in the 1930s.
As seen through the eyes of Moustafa's younger self (played
by Tony Revolori), Gustave's mastery of the concierge arts includes regularly
seducing the desiccated female aristocrats who throng the hotel in its golden
age. One of these, played with customary searchlight-through-fog brilliance by
Tilda Swinton, leaves Gustave a valuable painting in her will; her scowling,
posturing family, headed by Adrien Brody (who, it must be said, looks born to
wear a hussar's uniform), will stop at nothing to deprive Moustafa of his
inheritance.
In some hands, this convoluted, labyrinthine narrative would
end up a sprawling mess, but such is Anderson's storytelling discipline –
informed and sustained by the precision of the cinematography and set design –
that it never gets away from him. As Gustave skips from hotel lobby to prison
camp, from railway carriage to drawing room, the architecture of this
picaresque remains entirely lucid. It helps, a little, that Anderson's clout
has secured an instantly memorable A-list face for virtually every role,
however small: Bill Murray, Willem Dafoe, Edward Norton, Saiorse Ronan, Jeff
Goldbum, Harvey Keitel, Matthew Amalric … the list goes on.
With this film, Anderson has built a thoroughly likable
vision of a prewar Europe – no more real, perhaps, than the kind of Viennese
light-operetta that sustained much of 1930s Hollywood – but a distinctive,
attractive proposition all the same. It's a nimblefooted, witty piece, but one
also imbued with a premonitory sadness at the coming conflagration; the scenes
where Gustave and Zero are threatened by jackbooted thugs are properly
alarming. In this, the film reflects Zweig's own miserable death in 1942: a
suicide pact in Brazil with his wife, exiled like so many Austrian Jews, his
dreams of European unity shattered. Anderson's film is not a memorial to him,
exactly; but it summons up, rather wonderfully, the spirit Zweig represents.
The Grand Budapest Hotel: new
trailer released
Watch the new trailer for Wes
Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel, starring Ralph Fiennes and Saoirse Ronan
By Matt Lewis 09 Jan 2014 / http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturevideo/filmvideo/cinema-trailers/10559388/The-Grand-Budapest-Hotel-new-trailer-released.html
A new trailer for Wes Anderson's whimsical comedy-drama The
Grand Budapest Hotel has been released.
Featuring a highly impressive cast including Ralph Fiennes,
Saorsie Ronan, Bill Murray, Edward Norton and Jude Law, The Grand Budapest
Hotel recounts the adventures of Gustave H. (Fiennes), a legendary concierge at
a famous hotel from interwar Europe, and Zero Moustafa (newcomer Tony
Revolori), the lobby boy who becomes his most trusted friend. The latter's
adolescent love interest is provided by Saorsie Ronan.
When a former guest of the hotel, played by Tilda Swinton
with heavy prosthetics, turns up dead and a valuable painting of hers is
surprisingly bequeathed to Gustave, questions are raised and the police, led by
Edward Norton’s Henckels, get involved.
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