“It’s delightful,It’s delicious, It’s delirious It’s delectable, It’s
dilemma
It’s
de limit
, It’s deluxe It’s de-lovely”
THE-GRAND-BUDAPEST-HOTEL-elevator-scene
Thank you Cole Porter. The Grand Budapest Hotel is all of these things. Wes Anderson
has
proved himself to be as smooth as glass, as breezy as a zephyr, as sophisticated
and
as archly witty as Porter himself. From the beautifully designed pastel-hued hotel
exterior
with its wedding cake embellishments
to
the
too
-picture perfectly shaped and
placed
trees on the mountaintop location Anderson plays with scale, color, and depth of field to create a totally fairy tale quality.
The time frame is between the wars - an imaginary country somewhere in
middle
Europa. The characters are very much caricatures - all good or all bad, victims or
villains
. The exception being Ralph Fiennes as M. Gustave, the
legengdary
concierge of
the
legendary Grand Budapest Hotel, who plays his character as a mix of a fey rakish
dandy
and Hercule Poirot. He veers between a posh elegant accent and formal
verbiage
and jarringly contemporary
louche
pronouncements like “She was dynamite in
the
sack”. Willem Defoe as an arch-fiend (think Odd Job) is completely over the top. Saoirse Ronan as the pure and innocent Agatha is as winning as Tilda Swinton, the
spoiled
,
uber
rich, aging grand dame, Madame DeGoffe
und
Taxis is not. Adrien Brody
as
Dmitri, her
smarmy
, greedy, conniving heir is pure Boris Badenov (Rocky and Bullwinkle). There is a huge cast of well-known actors who portray their characters with finely-tuned tongue-in-cheek performances and eccentric accents.
It is a madcap tale in the tradition of Irving Thalberg’s 1932 Grand Hotel, which won the Best Picture Academy Award that year. There is a murder, art theft, romance, military
interventions
, a jailbreak and a chase scene across snowy mountains which involves ski
lifts
and a toboggan. Told with sly humor and so much attention to detail on every level
that
it keeps one in a delighted state of awe at the endless creativity which has been
brought
to bear in the production. In short, it is a glossy confection which lives up to all
of
the d-words of Cole Porter.
Review
