Grand Budapest Hotel is a baroque fantasia

WES Anderson’s ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’ is a deliciously rich and, dare I say, old-fashioned entertainment.

EVERY two or three years since his debut in 1996 with ‘Bottle Rocket’, Wes Anderson has produced an extremely idiosyncratic dramatic comedy involving groups of families or friends, unusual relationships and, most distinctively, very unusual and artificial settings.

The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) unfolds in a strange house in New York as a father attempts to reconcile with his genius children. In The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), an undersea explorer comes into contact with a young man who may be his long-lost son. Three brothers who don’t much like one another attempt reconciliation on a train in India in The Darjeeling Limited (2007); in Moonrise Kingdom (2012), a couple of very young teenagers run away together, triggering an extensive search by families and friends.

These plots may sound fairly conventional, but Anderson’s distinctive vision, his love of artifice and the thin line between caricature and character, plus his devotion to a stock company of actors, make these films among the most distinctive in recent American cinema. That’s not to say that they’ve been popular, because Anderson’s style is not to everyone’s taste, but they unquestionably stand out as the work of an artist whose work would never be confused with that of anyone else.

Anderson’s latest fantastic drama is The Grand Budapest Hotel, which was selected to open the Berlin film festival a couple of months ago. Inspired by the work of Viennese author Stefan Zweig (1881-1942), who provided the story on which one of the screen’s greatest romantic dramas, Max Ophuls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), was based, Anderson’s film is not so much about the hotel — although it’s a truly magnificent example of first-class 19th-century accommodation — as it is about Monsieur Gustave (Ralph Fiennes in top form), the hotel’s concierge during its golden age.

This was a period when grand hotels were named after famous cities in other countries: the Hotel Londres was in Madrid, the Hotel Paris was in Brussels, the Hotel Bristol was in Warsaw and the Grand Budapest Hotel is loc­ated in a small town in the mountains in the fictional country of Zubrowka. With its ornate facade and cavernously regal lobby it looked to me very much like the splendidly named Grand Hotel Pupp which, like the fictional Budapest, is located in a small mountain town in eastern Europe (the Pupp is in Karlovy Vary in what is now the Czech Republic).

The film begins in 1985 as a famous author (Tom Wilkinson) recalls how he visited the Grand Budapest for the first time in 1968. Now played by Jude Law, the author describes how, during the era of communism, the once magnificent but now decaying hotel has few clients. He meets the owner, Mr Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham), who tells his story. As a young immigrant, Moustafa (Tony Revolori) had arrived at the hotel back in 1932, when it was in its heyday. He was taken under the wing of M. Gustave, an imposing figure in his purple tuxedo, and shown the ropes. M. Gustave, it soon becomes clear, is a bisexual hedonist whose concept of looking after the hotel’s clients covers a great deal of ground. Always polite but extremely devious, M. Gustave takes pleasure in “entertaining” the elderly women who constitute the great hotel’s principal clients, and among his “favourites” is 85-year-old Madame Celine Villeneuve Desgoffe und Taxis (Tilda Swinton).

When Madame D, as she is known, is reported to have expired at her estate near the town of Lutz, M. Gustave, with Moustafa in tow, travels to attend the funeral and the reading of the will by the old lady’s executor, Kovacs (Jeff Goldblum). This leads to considerable problems when the old lady’s arrogant son, Dmitri (Adrien Brody), takes exception to the fact his mother left M. Gustave a valuable painting.

The ensuing adventures, consummately dished up by Anderson, who is in top form, are sheer delight and involve a prison escape, the outbreak of war and romance between Moustafa and Agatha (Saoirse Ronan), a sweet girl who works at a patisserie. The characters include a chief of police, played by Edward Norton, an assassin (Willem Dafoe), a butler (Mathieu Amalric), a maid (Lea Seydoux) and a convict (Harvey Keitel). Anderson regulars Bill Murray, Owen Wilson and Jason Schwartzman also pop up during the proceedings.

The result is a deliciously rich and, dare I say, old-fashioned entertainment, filled with affectionate jokes and cinematic references. Movie buffs will be intrigued to observe the way Anderson shifts the size of the screen image according to the period in which the story is taking place, from the old square ratio in 1932 to the wide Scope screen for more modern times.

The work of the costume and (especially) production designers is breathtakingly good, with the elegant old hotel’s appearance subtly changing according to the era in question. And the other great thing about Anderson is that he wastes no time; this complicated story with its dozens of interesting characters unfolds in a little more than 1½ hours.

The Grand Budapest Hotel (M)

4.5 stars

Limited release from Thursday