Manners maketh the movie
Wes Anderson has been deified (or, in some quarters, dismissed) for his devotion to style, with films such as The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Darjeeling Limited and Moonrise Kingdom best remembered less for their characters, themes and acting, and more for their aesthetic idiosyncrasies.
Indeed, Anderson has become the hipster director par excellence whose stylistic tics - static shots, theatrical framing and symmetrical compositions, obviously artificial sets, obsession with pop-culture arcana and a regular uber-cool ensemble cast including, of course, the enduringly fashionable Bill Murray - are drooled over by the indie crowd.
All these quirks are in full cry in Anderson's latest, The Grand Budapest Hotel, a farcical murder- mystery set in a mythical European alpine country called Zubrowka in-between the wars. Indeed, it's a veritable catalogue of Anderson-isms, right down to the laughably fake-looking mountain- top chase scene that might have been filmed in his bedroom.
Yet this dedication to style for its own sake makes more sense in The Grand Budapest Hotel than any of Andreson's previous films, with his hero, the flamboyant, fastidious and dazzlingly enterprising concierge Gustave H. (Ralph Fiennes), almost an Oscar Wildean figure in his belief that elegance and good manners is our best weapon against barbarism and thuggery.
We learn of the fabulous Gustav through an elderly man named Zero Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham) who tells a writer (Jude Law) the story of the man who gave him a job as the lobby boy in the Grand Budapest Hotel when it was at its height and then led him on the adventures of a lifetime.
When we first meet Monsieur Gustave he's running the Grand Budapest like an orchestra conductor, waving his white-gloved hands and rattling off instructions as he sweeps though the hotel, keeping all the parts in perfect synchronisation.
Indeed, Gustave is so efficient and in control that he finds time to romance the rich elderly female guests - he has a particular taste for needy, desperate blondes - even though he is probably gay (his luvvy lingo, dashed off with knowing elan by Fiennes, is the giveaway).
Gustave's current pensionable paramour is a particularly decrepit heiress played by Tilda Swinton, one of an array of cameos that make The Grand Budapest the spot-the-actor movie of the year.
When the old girl passes away and leaves Gustave a priceless artwork he's accused of murder by the nastiest of her relatives - a brute in a long leather coat played with relish by Pianist Oscar-winner Adrien Brody - and becomes the target of a grim-faced hitman straight out of a Z-grade movie (Willem Dafoe).
Gustav and his devoted lobby boy Moustafa (Tony Revolori as the younger version) swipe the painting and flee, pursued by the local police chief (Ed Norton), who throws the concierge into jail.
Nothing, however, will stop the resourceful Gustav from claiming what is his, especially when he can call upon the loyal Zero, his cake-making whiz girlfriend (Soarise Ronan), a group of monks and, best of all, a cabal of on-call fellow concierges.
Anderson says that The Grand Budapest Hotel was inspired by the Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig. However, Zweig's refined tales of Mittel-European manners are just one of numerous influences on Anderson's movie, which has echoes of the sophisticated Golden Age Hollywood comedies of Ernst Lubitsch as well as the zaniness of the Marx Brothers (Zubrowka is a near neighbour of Duck Soup's Freedonia).
Indeed, Anderson's famed dollhouse aesthetic has reached wider than ever before, with seemingly an entire lost world of faded European elegance evoked in scene after meticulously designed scene, right down to the crazed climactic shootout, which feels as if it has been storyboarded using a pink-hued pop-up book.
While art direction is Anderson's signature, this time around he injects a level of comic exuberance that feels new to the director.
This is pushed along by the sensationally funny performance of Fiennes, whose calm and panache in any situation - from wooing foot-in-the-grave clientele to negotiating the horrors of prison - is so rich it's almost a philosophy of life.
In fact, Anderson has never been breezier nor more effortlessly entertaining than in The Grand Budapest Hotel yet it still feels kind of profound and tinged with sadness, with Gustav's savoir faire, daring and dedication to living and loving in high style some kind of statement against the darkness that soon engulfed Europe.
The Grand Budapest Hotel also makes us appreciate our very own Monsieur Gustave, Bob Carr, whose love of first-class travel and in-flight pyjamas and annoyance at the lack of English subtitles on the operas screened in business class would get a round of applause from the concierge.
It is completely barbaric,
darling.
