we want to sleep here
1.In an era when hotels are silent and anonymous places, this hotel recovers the tradition of the hotel where things happen and everyone finds out . It brings us back to the hotels of To be or not to be, of the Grand Hotel (and even the Hotel, let's not be so cultured) where the guests milled around the reception when they found out something and where they knew the concierges by name.
two. The janitors, those characters who are always handsome now. The one in the movie plays him Ralph Fiennes (yes, doing comedy, not burnt person or any shakespeare). Gustave H is a manual concierge, the one who manages all the information (and therefore is charged with power) and wins favors. The film's main characters are two guys loaded with information, a concierge and a bell boy.
3. We understand what the bellman is saying when Gustave H asks him why he wants to be a bellboy. Answer: “How not? Who wouldn't want to be at the Grand Hotel, sir?" We would like to be art and part of that microcosm, with or without a uniform.
Four. The microcosm. Wes Anderson shines here. The movie has sixteen characters all of them_tennenbaums_ and moonrisekingdoms. As always, they are almost unrecognizable: Tilda Swinton is in her eighties and Edward Norton appears in the lobby as a policeman in an astrakhan coat.
5. The hotel returns power to the lobby. Halls have lost power, or at least hall form. We like hotels that look like hotels, that have check-in counters, a main staircase, a concierge space, baggage handlers, and elevators with attendants. Do not confuse us with modernities.
6. Ever since we saw The Apartment and bitterly identified with Miss Kubelick, we have felt unending sympathy for the elevator operators. They listen and shut up. And they almost always suffer.
7.Anderson's characters suffer too, but they never seem to. Tremendous things happen to them, almost tragedies, but they always worry about the little things in life, about the kiss that resists, if a song is playing or if someone has to be punched in the face. That's why we want to live in his movies.
8. But there's a half of the world that doesn't, that hates Wes Anderson and his overstylization of the world and aesthetic mannerisms of it. At Grand Hotel Budapest you will find a good target for your darts because it is pure Wes Anderson.
9.And Wes Anderson is a modern journeyman, but only in form, like so many. Basically he is a classic that has set foot in many great hotels. And we like that those in his films have a hotel-hotel name: Grand Hotel, Excelsior.
10. By the way, the director did not shoot the movie in any hotel, but in an Art-Deco department store in Görlitz, Germany. Long live the cinema and its tricks.