[COLUMN] Ten Years Ago, The Grand Budapest Hotel Felt Like Nostalgia; Now It Seems Like Prophecy | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Released ten years ago last week, Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel is defined by the absences at its center.

During one pivotal scene, lawyer Vilmos Kovacs (Jeff Goldblum) sifts through the last will and testament of the recently departed Dowager Countess Céline Villeneuve Desgoffe-und-Taxis (Tilda Swinton). “Something's missing,” he notes. “A crucial document, either misplaced or, conceivably, destroyed. I don't know what it contains, I don't know what it represents, I don't know what it is, but there are traces and shadows of it everywhere.” It’s a gap, but a gap that draws attention to itself.

Anderson’s movies before The Grand Budapest Hotel tended to be deeply personal works about weirdos and their dysfunctional families. Indeed, one of the most consistent criticisms leveled at his early films was that they were shallow affections, “clever if increasingly hollow” movies that were ultimately little more than “overly precious paintings.” Arriving at a point where Anderson ran the risk of becoming stale as an artist, The Grand Budapest Hotel demonstrated the director had big things to say - often by drawing attention to the things his work wasn’t saying.

The Grand Budapest Hotel is, like a lot of Anderson’s films, constructed as a narrative nesting doll. It tells stories within stories. A young girl (Jella Niemann) reads a book written by an anonymous author (Tom Wilkinson). That author tells a story from his own youth (played by Jude Law). He recalls a chance encounter with hotel proprietor Zero Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham), who regales him with a story of his time as the young bellhop at the eponymous institution (played by Tony Revolori).

As such, The Grand Budapest Hotel is a story of nostalgia within nostalgia, one very much shaped and altered in the telling twice-over. In particular, Zero acknowledges that the story has its own absences. He casually mentions his first encounter with his future wife Agatha (Saoirse Ronan). “This was also when I met Agatha, but we won't discuss that,” he tells the author. There are things that Zero cannot or will not say, lurking at the edge of this beautiful storyboard world.

Death is one such absence. To be clear, death is an essential part of The Grand Budapest Hotel. It opens with the young woman visiting the author’s grave. Its first shot is of the young woman walking alongside a red brick wall marked “Old Lutz Cemetery”, in the fictional nation of Zubrowka. Zero’s mentor, the mysterious Gustave H. (Ralph Fiennes), maintains a number of amorous relationships with older women, including the Dowager Countess, whose death serves to drive much of the plot.

However, despite the ever-present specter of death, most of the killing takes place off-screen. When Kovacs is murdered by the sinister J.G. Jopling (Willem Dafoe), he is pulled back through a doorway and the door is slammed shut. It severs his fingers, but it keeps the act itself concealed. When Jopling murders butler Serge X. (Mathieu Amalric) in a confessional, he makes sure to close the screen first. He kills and decapitates Serge’s sister (Giselda Volodi) off-screen.

There is an element of discretion here. The last time that the audience sees Agatha, she is marrying Zero. They are happy. However, death lurks over the horizon. “She and our infant son would be killed two years later by the Prussian grippe,” Zero explains to the author. The last time the audience sees Gustave H., he is tangling with fascists. The shot is obscured, taking place through the window of a train carriage. The train’s horn drowns out the noise. “In the end, they shot him,” Zero states.

This approach to mortality makes a certain amount of sense. Anderson shoots The Grand Budapest Hotel like it is a confection from the bakery where Agatha works. Production designers Adam Stockhausen and Anna Pinnock created one of the most visually impressive worlds ever realized on film, with the characters occupying a space that seems to exist somewhere between live action and animation. Of course, as the old proverb goes, “et arcadia ego.” Even in paradise, there is death.

In terms of plot, The Grand Budapest Hotel is a charming run-around. The Dowager Countess leaves Gustave a priceless painting in her will, and in retaliation her son Dmitri (Adrien Brody) frames Gustave for her murder. Arrested and imprisoned, Gustave breaks out of custody with Zero’s help. The pair set out to prove Gustave’s innocence. In the process, they discover the hidden document that Kovacs mentioned: a second will, in which the Dowager Countess left everything to Gustave.

However, there is something bubbling away at the edge of the frame. It’s only fleetingly acknowledged, but it’s also inescapable. Like death, it exerts a strange pull on the movie. The Grand Budapest Hotel is a story about fascism and decadence. At its core, the film explores the way in which fascism hollows out the core of any grand old institution that it takes hold of, leaving scars and gaps in its wake. It creates absences and silences that history contorts itself around. It’s like gravity, bending reality around it.

The Grand Budapest Hotel is a product of Anderson’s obvious and abiding affection for Europe, an interest that also informs his later work on The French Dispatch and even his Roald Dahl adaptations. Although Anderson is from Texas, he would move to Europe during the 2000s, splitting his time between England and France. He’s talked about being “dazzled” by how “there’s an old world that is still there.” The Grand Budapest Hotel is about Europe.

The hotel itself could be seen as a metaphor for Europe, once a truly global power, but which has fallen into decline and disrepair over the past century. “Times have changed,” Zero admits to the author. When the author praises the “thermal baths” as “very beautiful”, Zero politely dismisses the compliment. “They were in their first condition,” he admits. “It couldn't be maintained, of course. Too decadent for current tastes. But I love it all just the same, this enchanting old ruin.”

The hotel is a bohemian and liminal space. It houses dignitaries and aristocrats but is maintained by an anonymous migratory class. Many of the servants in The Grand Budapest Hotel are somewhat anonymous – the audience never discovers the surnames of Gustave H. or Serge X. Zero is a migrant, who fled to the hotel from Aq Salim al-Jabat. In their final conversation, Agatha notes that Zero and Gustave are “one from the East and one from the West”, who have been “united, for an instant.”

The Grand Budapest Hotel was inspired by the work of Austrian writer Stefan Zweig. Zweig’s writing was deemed “un-German” and was burnt by fascists. Fearing Nazi control of Austria, he fled into exile. “So I belong nowhere now, I am a stranger or at the most a guest everywhere,” he wrote in The World of Yesterday. He would take his own life in 1942, lamenting in his suicide note “[his] own language having disappeared from [him] and [his] spiritual home, Europe, having destroyed itself.”

The bulk of The Grand Budapest Hotel unfolds against the backdrop of a march towards a fictionalized version of the Second World War. Anderson sought to evoke that particular period because that past was still present, “You know, the reason I want to engage with it is because this series of events in Europe are somehow still right in the middle of our lives.” As Nick Pinkerton notes, this encroaching fascism is “represented by a slow escalation of casual cruelty.”

The Grand Budapest Hotel is populated by characters who would suffer greatly under fascism. Zero is a migrant. Gustave is suggested to be bisexual, and Dmitri throws homophobic slurs at him. Kovacs is Jewish. However, these characters remain largely oblivious of their nation’s descent into tyranny. Early in the film, Zero presents Gustave with a newspaper headlined, “Will there be war? Tanks at Border.” Gustave focuses on the smaller news story about the death of the Dowager Countess. Like death, it cannot be looked at head-on.

Gustave is convinced that there is no problem that he can’t talk his way around. On their way to the Dowager Countess’ wake, their train is stopped by jackboot thugs who threaten to apprehend Zero. Gustave appeals to their leader, Albert Henckels (Edward Norton), who is moved by the kindness that Gustave showed him as a boy. With the threat deflated, Gustave assures Zero that “there are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity.”

However, reality can only be ignored for so long. Later in the film, after they escape from custody, Gustave and Zero discover that their beloved hotel has been occupied by fascist thugs. Banners hang over the interiors. Soldiers march through the corridors. Extending the metaphor of the hotel as Europe, the film’s climax descends into a gunfight across the lobby. What was once a cultured and civilized space becomes a site of violence.

Of course, Gustave and Zero ultimately prevail. They defeat Dmitri and reveal the Dowager Countess’ secret second will. It seems like a happy ending – until it isn’t. Gustave’s final scene is shot in stark black-and-white, eschewing Anderson’s pastel color scheme. As before, Gustave and Zero are travelling on a train. It grinds to a halt. Zero even acknowledges the familiarity of the set-up. “Why are we stopping at a barley field again?” he wonders, aloud.

Once again, a set of soldiers enter the cabin. Once again, Gustave is debonair. “You're the first of the official death squads to whom we've been formally introduced,” he muses. “How do you do?” He jokes, “Plus ça change, am I right?” This is the same sort of charm offensive that has served Gustave well for most of the movie, allowing him to talk his way out of crisis after crisis. Unfortunately, his luck runs out. Zero is smashed in the face with a rifle, and Gustave is shot for defending him.

This act of brutality is itself symbolic. Zero explains that this happened on “the 21st day of the occupation, the morning the independent state of Zubrowka officially ceased to exist.” Gustave’s death is not just the death of a man, but the death of a country. More than that, it is the death of a particular understanding of the world. The Grand Budapest Hotel would never be the same again. It would ultimately be reduced to a shell of their former self, more a memory than an actual place.

When the film was released in 2014, it seemed like a recollection of the damage that fascism caused to the European continent. Former American ambassador to the Czech Republic Norman L. Eisen argued that the film was “one of the smartest and most sophisticated movies ever made about both the causes of the Holocaust and its consequences.” However, it's interesting to rewatch The Grand Budapest Hotel at the remove of a decade. The film has not changed, but the world has.

The Grand Budapest Hotel understands the encroaching threat of fascism, an idea to which Anderson would return more directly with Isle of Dogs. It’s a charming adventure that happens to be set just as a nation slips into dictatorship. As such, it conveys the ease with which that transition might occur, the way in which characters with more important priorities might overlook the warning signs or react to them with casual dismissal, if at all. That absence at the center only grows stronger in the dark.

Gustave’s belief that civility and decency will always triumph over violence, that he has cultivated a persona and a world too sophisticated to succumb to outright thuggery, suggests the misplaced confidence that “it could never happen here.” In hindsight, The Grand Budapest Hotel is a story about how even the grandest and most robust of institutions cannot withstand a sustained assault by those who would subvert democracy to their own ends and how those forces hollow out an institution - and a nation - from the inside.

Ten years ago, The Grand Budapest Hotel felt like a eulogy. Today, it feels like a warning.