So imagine my pleasant surprise when I saw Wes Anderson's latest comedy, The Grand Budapest Hotel, on its premier night in Toronto. Having never seen any of his films before, I didn't know what to expect except for the fact that I found the promotional trailer for this film absolutely hilarious. Anderson's previous works always seemed too quirky for me but like the Coen brothers, Anderson has a huge following, particularly among younger fans.
According to Anderson, his screenplay was inspired by the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig who also wrote Letter From An Unknown Woman and Marie Antoinette. So Anderson wrote the story about the adventures of a legendary concierge, Gustave H, at a famous hotel between the wars, and the lobby boy Zero Moustafa who becomes his protege. A lot of people thought the movie is about a hotel in Budapest, but the whole fictional hotel is actually located in an imaginary place in Europe that looks more like Switzerland, but the film was actually shot in Saxony, Germany.
The result of Anderson's writing and direction is a highly-creative film which is not only extremely cartoonish and funny, but it's so beautifully shot that I felt like I was watching a flawless fairy tale for grown-ups! But beneath the laughter also lies a satire about the end of the European aristocracy with the brutal onslaught of the Nazis during the war. Comedies are all about timing, and Anderson's situational and caricatural work would certainly go down in history as one of the most iconic comedies of our times!
The movie, of course, is very much a success because of its cast of 'substantial' thousands, some of whom are regulars in Anderson's works - Ralph Fiennes, Jude Law, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Murray, Ed Norton, Tilda Swinton, Harvey Keitel, Owen Wilson and Tom Wilkinson. Everybody is extremely funny, but the charmismatic Ralph Fiennes deserves the biggest kudos as he demonstrates his talents way beyond his usual melancholic and brooding leading roles from Shakespeare to Dickens.
It's not just a good laugh, but The Grand Budapest Hotel is a hilarious masterpiece worth watching again and again on the big screen!
