T he Grand Budapest Hotel is not in Budapest. As director Wes Anderson says, “We know this thing of hotels that are named for another city in a city, that’s the Budapest . Our country is invented, and I think it combines Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland. It mixes together many countries, but Budapest does get special notice as the namesake of our hotel. I also think our movie is partly inspired by Hollywood movies, maybe from the 30’s, that were set in places like Warsaw and Prague and Budapest.”
The Grand Budapest Hotel is set in somewhereistan, alpine Zubrowka, in a fictional spa town. Set between the wars in the 1930s, when life was all swinging and nice, The Grand Budapest Hotel follows the fortunes of this magnificently popular hotel and its fastidious concierge, Monsieur Gustave H (Ralph Feinnes).
Like Gustave, the hotel’s fortunes also peak and trough with fascism, the Second World War and the Communist regime. The mysterious death of a wealthy dowager, a priceless renaissance painting that goes missing, an evil grasping son, his witless henchman, an author, an attorney, a chocolatier and a career criminal form the colourful citizenry of Zubrowka.
Talking about his starting point for the movie, Anderson says, “I had an idea with my friend Hugo. He and I had talked for some years about a character inspired by a friend of ours, an exceptionally, supremely charming person with a unique and wonderful way with words and a very special view of life. Then, separately, I had this thought to make a kind of a European movie – inspired especially by Stefan Zweig, a writer who I’ve come to really love in the last several years. There were some other things that I was reading that might not seem connected to this movie, like Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem , as well as Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky. Those were some of the things I started with, and I mixed them with the idea that Hugo and I had about this friend of ours. And that’s what this movie is, sort of, in a way.” A department store in Görlitz, the town bordering Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic stood in for the hotel.
To call Budapest star-studded would be an understatement. Tilda Swinton plays the 84-year-old dowager Madame D. with much prosthetics. Her death sets the wheels in motion. Adrien Brody plays Dimitri, Madame D’s evil son, “the bad seed” according to Anderson, who wants to get his sticky hands on the fortune. Dimitri’s thick-as-a-brick henchman is played by the changeful Willem Dafoe.
Sexy, cool Jeff Goldblum ditches his nerdy glasses for a Sigmund Freud-inspired beard as Vilmos Kovacs, Madam D’s attorney. Mathieu Amalric, who we remember as the reptilian Dominic Greene in Quantum of Solace plays the butler, Serge X. Saoirse Ronan ( Hannah, Atonement ) plays Agatha who works in the best bakery in Zubrowka, Mendl. Edward Norton is the Captain of the Military Police, Albert Henckels, Harvey Keitel is the bald, tattooed convict Ludwig and Jude Law plays the author as a young man.
The movie is supposed to be a tender love story as well as a sumptuously appointed period piece, a cosy crime caper and a murder mystery. With master craftsman Wes Anderson at the helm, all the luminescent star power, the upstairs-downstairs murder mystery, complete with little bottles sinisterly labelled “strychnine,” the elements for an enjoyable evening at the movies are in place.