Wes Anderson’s peculiar wit, color palette, and aesthetic make Anderson’s style special and immediately recognizable. As Anderson said in his interview with Vanity Fair, “That’s the kind of movie that I like to make, where there is an invented reality and the audience is going to go someplace where hopefully they’ve never been before. The details, that’s what the world is made of.”
The Grand Budapest Hotel is one of those expansive, vivid invented realities — this time a tragicomical quasi-Eastern Europe land named in honor of Polish vodka. It is a fairytale about the poor, kind, and earnest refugee-orphan Zero Moustafa, who is rewarded for his loyalty with mind-boggling riches. It is also about the great, unsurpassed senior concierge Monsieur Gustav, who managed to outwit a corrupted and powerful villain. However, most importantly, The Grand Budapest Hotel is about a bygone era of extravagance, dignity, and poetry, and it is no coincidence that the name of Stefan Zweig is mentioned in the credits of the film.
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Let us explore this multilayered microcosm, and hunt for symbolism and hidden meanings in one of Wes Anderson’s best films.
A Memory That Becomes a Fairytale
Fox Searchlight Pictures
The Grand Budapest Hotel is truly an unusual adaptation. It credits Stephen Zweig’s works as its inspiration. It is not, however, the fiction that interested Wes Anderson but the autobiographical The World of Yesterday. The director even admits to stealing from Zweig in his interview with Telegraph.
True, there is no chic hotel and its inhabitants in this memoir, but there is something else, something more: observations of European culture that existed before the World Wars. This civilization, like a mythical Atlantis, disappeared without a trace. Zweig remembered that world — that Europe — to be complex, ambiguous, but humane and beautiful. This view is wholeheartedly shared by Anderson.
Anderson translated Zweig’s Myth of Old Europe into, as the New Yorker puts it: “an exquisite microcosm of aesthetic refinement and tactful reserve shadowed by monstrous forces.” What is great about movies adapted from books, is that a wonderful film can rejuvenate interest in a book that was forgotten.
Zubrowka, which was once the center of the empire, is a generalized image of all the states that arose on the ruins of Austria-Hungary, and at the same time a conditional fairy-tale space. The myth of Eastern Europe, in this sense, consists of a series of romantic pictorial images, national music, toy-looking architecture, and the notion of a pre-World War II time that will never return. From the idea of the completeness of this time, the impossibility of its return grows into the possibility of manipulating it to build its mythical image. This is, in a sense, what nostalgia really is.
We only arrive at the Grand Budapest of Monsieur Gustave after passing through multiple layers of time and subjectivity, narrators and mediums: a teenage girl in the present day reading a novel, the novel’s author talking into a camera about the process of writing his book in the 1980s, a younger version of said author meeting an aged Zero in the decrepit, Soviet-era Grand Budapest, and Zero recounting his story. Such intricacies intend to blur the edges of reality and acknowledge its own artifice.
Monsieur Gustave’s Grand Budapest was at the height of its glory. In 1968, little was left of its splendor, but the hotel itself is still standing, and witnesses of its glory are alive. By 1985, the magnificent place is no more, and no one experienced it first-hand, but the author sets to carefully record everything that he once heard from witnesses. And then, only a book remains to tell about the Grand Budapest Hotel and its inhabitants.
Visual Storytelling: The Dusk of the Old Europe
The Grand Budapest Hotel has some period inaccuracies (appropriate, considering the fairy-tale space of its nostalgia), but it has some gorgeous set and costume design, with some of the best period costumes of recent years, deservedly receiving an Oscar for Best Costume Design. About working on the movie, costume designer Milena Canonero says that Anderson was interested in the history of the decline of Europe, its death, and its immersion in darkness. According to her, Madame D is a symbol of the good old, somewhat eccentric, but generous Europe. Her clothes represent the sun.
Looking closely at the print of Madame D’s first dress, there are clear parallels with Klimt’s The Tree of Life. Then her yellow and gold outfits are gradually replaced by red ones. Thus, Canonero and Anderson show viewers the sunset (read, the sunset of Europe).
Continuing the sunset analogy, Canonero reflects on the fact that after sunset, all colors fade: “That’s exactly what happened at that time in Europe. That is why the uniforms of the soldiers are gray at first, and then, in the course of the film, turn black”.
Dimitry and his three sisters wear black, symbolizing the darkness coming into power in Europe. Canonero says: “The brother is the leader of the pack, and the sisters are his three dark echoes. Even indoors, they wear their hair covered and a large cross around their neck. In reality, they are killers".
Who is Monsieur Gustave?
The charming Monsieur Gustave is not only the main character of the film, the one around whom all the events unfold, but also a living embodiment of Zweig’s world of yesterday. Not even the Europe of the 1930s, but that European civilization which existed before 1914. The aged Zero speaks directly about this, at the end of his dinner with the Author: “To be frank, I think his world had vanished long before he ever entered it. But I will say, he certainly sustained the illusion with a marvelous grace”.
Here the world of the film takes on another dimension. As it turns out, the nostalgia experienced by its characters is not the nostalgia for the time before the war, but for the golden age of art nouveau (the hotel is built in this exact style), great traditions, and great people.
Looking at the brilliant, always impeccably dressed and groomed, graceful Monsieur Gustave — at the same time lonely and inclined to ‘go to bed with all [his] friends’ — it could be that the world, destroyed by the Great War, was like this, indulgent and strange, but with unshakable ideas of honor and duty; also humane in the broadest sense of the word. After all, the most important quality of Gustave was his sense of honor and organizational skills. Under Monsieur Gustave, everything in the hotel worked like clockwork — and he truly loved his clients.
After being thrown into prison, his richly purple uniform switched to striped prison robes, the only thing Gustave longs for to feel like himself again is precious L’Air de Panache. The name of the perfume literally means ‘to appear in flamboyant confidence of style or manner,’ and he uses it so generously that the smell lingers long after he leaves the room.
As Martin Scorcese writes for Esquire: “He [Anderson] knows how to convey the simple joys and interactions between people so well and with such richness. This kind of sensibility is rare in movies”. A good example is also the moment when Gustave makes a great prison escape, with the ardent Zero waiting for him outside. Zero forgot disguises? It’s okay. No safe house? It is indeed difficult to organize one… No L’Air de Panache? That, however, breaks Gustave. His miserable lament offends his companion — but with Zero’s past revealed, Gustave apologizes at once, and they declare each other brothers.
Another important aspect of Monsieur Gustave’s character and his mentorship/friendship with Zero is poetry. He writes poems, tries to accustom his staff to them, and encourages Zero and Agatha’s lyrical endeavors. However, it becomes a gag that his poetry recitals are always rudely interrupted. There is no more time, the gag gloomily signifies, to appreciate the beauty of the moment and commemorate it with a poem.
The execution of Monsieur Gustave at the end of the movie only seems like an unexpected plot twist: in fact, it is achingly logical. In the first train scene, which parallels this one, there are still some remnants of the old era. The police investigator recognizes Gustave and pays his respects to the kindness the latter showed him when he was a child.
The world, represented by the magnificent concierge, finally died during the war, though. Firstly, the end comes for the decadent but kind and gentle Madame D (she represents the Old Europe), then justice is murdered (represented by the Deputy Vilmos Kovacs), and then it is time for values. In the era of Auschwitz and Treblinka, the ideas of respect, nobility, and honor turned out to be poorly compatible with reality. In a new world where violence and brutality rule, Monsieur Gustave is doomed.
Despite the bleak ending, Anderson’s film is full of optimism. Yes, epochs pass along with their heroes, and we cannot stop time. Nothing, however, leaves without a trace: there will always be someone who will recount the past, and someone who will write the story.
The hotel, which ceased to exist in reality, came to life on the pages of a book read by young people (the popularity of the book is evidenced by the number of keys that decorate the monument to the Author) — and, thus, became immortal. The stories become fairytales, but this metamorphism is comforting. Fairytales are familiar and understandable to everyone, especially if they are told the Wes Anderson way.
