Hotels are a fascinating dichotomy. In their erection, they symbolize a cohesive permanence, while each of their subdivided quarters represents separation and temporality – momentary domiciles with perfunctory furnishings and individual use accoutrements like soaps, shampoos, and mouthwashes. Used once these items are thrown away. Used for a day, each room is inhabited and abandoned, like a shell shed for another hermit crab.
Such an interpretation of hotels is part of what impels the creepiness of films like The Shining or Psycho. In each, the space offers a modicum of refuge. The Overlook Hotel in all its opulence appears as a monument of American capitalism and success, while representing a reprieve for “all the best people.” Ironically, it portends to offer a respite for the weary Torrences, although it ultimately impels the father’s spire into insanity. In Psycho, Norman Bates’ inherited motel provides a safe have haven for Marion Crane, one that provides her time to reflect on her transgressions.
In Wes Anderson’s new film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, the mass domicile appears as far less creepy than those in the aforementioned films, but there is an overarching cynicism in the hotel’s existence. Characteristic to most Anderson films, each shot is meticulously crafted. And in the case of this film, each scene is carefully subdivided into images of rectangles and squares. Lines are rigid and defining, while curves and circles are hardly present. In this, the hotel becomes akin to the jail-cell doors that appear later in the film, with each room a momentary prison for those who visit. Locked away, each party is isolated.
Ostensibly, The Grand Budapest Hotel is about the burgeoning of an unlikely friendship between the hotel’s manager Gustave H (Ralph Fiennes) and its lobby-boy-in-training Zero Mustafa (Tony Revolori). But more so, the film is about the fetishization of legacy into symbols. Take for example the hotel itself, a testament to opulence in its grandeur, but also a symbol to the inevitably deceased Gustave H., whose ability to afford such a palatial hotel was afforded by the fortune left to him by Madame D. (Tilda Swinton). In her passing, her family – most notably Dmitri (Adrien Brody) summarize her through her wealth and her bequeathing to Gustave the fictitiously famous painting, “Boy with Apple.”
Through the painting, we understand her generosity, but is simultaneously a symbol of her wealth and her spite against her family — she always lived under the assumption that one day her apparent heirs would murder her. And through her relationship with Gustave – which was sexually convenient for him – we understand how lonely in fact she was.
We find similar fetishization in the very beginning of the film when a young girl approaches the bronze bust of an author in a cemetery. In her hands, she holds the fictional novel, The Grand Budapest Hotel, and it is upon the author (Tom Wilkinson as the older version; Jude Law as the younger) that she looks. The tale she is most familiar with is affiliated with the author; however, the author (the older version) notes that the “public brings the characters” to the author; they don’t just materialize in a writer’s imagination. Thus, the fame from which he derives is actually taken from listening to the older Mustafa’s (F. Murray Abraham) relate his story of his relationship with Gustave. That said, the story with which the girl is familiar is twice altered: once by Mustafa and once by the author, and it is unfortunately ironical that the author is the one cast in bronze as the monument of fame, whereas Gustave remains unassuming in life and a character in the novel.
Within this look at authorship, Anderson also offers commentary on the writing and re-writing of history, begging us to question who and what is worth remembering and whether celebrity should be the prize ultimately celebrated, or whether it should be the various components that lead to one’s celebrity.
