The Grand Budapest Hotel is the latest Wes Anderson film and it is beautiful to look at, scrumptious, luscious, such a delicious confection I would have marched up to the screen and licked it if only, at the screening I attended, Mark Kermode had not been occupying the seat in front, and it would have meant scrambling over him, and maybe ruining his hair. (A quiff like that doesn’t hairdress itself, you know.) So I stayed put, feasting with my eyes — on the film, not the quiff — so it was sensually satisfying, but emotionally satisfying? Not so much, alas. Divine pastries, divine clothes, divine period trappings, but, as with most of Anderson’s films, I was never moved or understood what mattered, if any of it mattered. I’m even forgetting it as I’m remembering it, as if it had been no more than a dream.
The framing device, notionally, is Tom Wilkinson, an author reflecting on his younger days, thereby transporting us back to 1968, when he was Jude Law and stayed at the Grand Budapest, situated in the fictional ‘Republic of Zebrowka’. By this time, it had already descended into what appears to be a Soviet-style decline, but on his visit he encounters Zero Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham), the hotel’s owner. The two take dinner together in the faded glory that is now the hotel restaurant, which serves pompous dishes to almost no guests, but is still wonderfully mise-en-scène mad, with paintings and stag heads and a cheeky, presumably underemployed waiter trying to get into shot. Moustafa, for his part, recalls first arriving at the hotel in 1932, as the new lobby boy, when the hotel was enjoying its heyday; when it looked like a multi-tiered, pink frosted cake from the outside and, inside, was buzzing with eye-popping colours and energy and life.
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