Cine Me

 

 

The Grand Budapest Hotel

 

 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2278388/

 

 

http://www.grandbudapesthotel.com/

 

 

So yes, a Wes Anderson movie, and hooray for that. At the moment, there are very few American filmmakers with the ability to articulate such an original, idiosyncratic vision and the means to express that vision so freely. There is a lot of integrity here and also a good deal of ambition. This is a movie concerned with — and influenced by — an especially rich and complicated slice of 20th-century European culture, and therefore a reckoning, characteristically playful but also fundamentally serious, with some very ugly history.

 

"The Grand Budapest Hotel," written by Anderson, was inspired by the work of Stefan Zweig, an Austrian novelist and biographer who wrote about old Europe and later committed suicide in Brazil, in exile from his country during World War II. That feeling of something beautiful that has been lost is present here, not hammered home, not sentimentalized, but as a running undertone.

 

But also there's Fiennes, and Anderson's investment in Fiennes. Gustave, a complicated character, carries with him the movie's spirit. He's a scoundrel, but he believes in something - call it beauty, or the right way of doing things. He's a comic character, and yet you end up seeing him as some kind of great man, perhaps a kind that can't exist anymore.
That perception of Fiennes and Gustave is central to the whole enterprise. Without it, the movie just breaks off and flies away. But with it, "The Grand Budapest Hotel" becomes something wonderful.

 

Highly recommended.