It’s just that Hayao Miyazaki in the East usually returns directly to the innocent world of children, depicting the most simple and natural truth, goodness and beauty, while Wes Anders in the West likes abstraction and even magnified reality, making people in extreme environments, Under the humorous ridicule throughout the story, the personality of the weird character looks for the warmth and courage hidden in the corner. (Think of his works, whether the early "Youth" and "Trenbaums" or the more recent "Looking for Darjeeling" and "Moonrise Kingdom" are all like this.) Perhaps the two are compared, or the latter. It is closer to the truth, and therefore more comforting.
At the beginning of June, I saw Anders’ new film "The Grand Budapest Hotel" in Hong Kong theaters. With the English soundtrack and Cantonese subtitles interrupted by each other, I was still deeply moved. The director has used his usual skills and tone to be more proficient: the scene is beautiful, the lens is exquisite and beautiful, and the characters, no matter how big or small, are all three-dimensional and vivid. This time, I am particularly dazzling in narrative skills. Within two minutes of the beginning of the story, three narrators and four timelines appear. Time goes back and forth, quickly turning back to 1985, 1968, 1932 from the present...
Of course, Skillful skills can only add to the joy of watching movies, and more importantly, the content itself, specific to this film, is the director's ambition to portray an elegant old world with fairy tales.
The story is set in a virtual country, the Republic of Zubrowka. The film describes it as “the former center of the empire, the farthest eastern border of the European continent”. From the very beginning, the audience can imagine for themselves and take their seats.
The protagonist of the story, Mr. Gustav, was the first concierge in the famous Budapest Grand Hotel in this country. He was almost a representative of the European aristocracy at that time: he was personable, elegant, and always paying attention to etiquette and appearance; he loved literature and Philosophy, especially love poetry; keep promises, respect everyone, give the best of goodwill and trust; have strict self-examination and restraint, both in life and thought. Although he keeps dating many elderly, lonely, and wealthy women, making them fall in love and gifting him with inheritance, this does not seem to damage (if not increase) his personality, especially because he really does. For the sake of everyone, on the contrary, their haggard years are radiant.
The story has an intricate and fascinating structure, which is presented by the director in a concise and delicate way. It takes only 100 minutes and is packed with a huge amount of information. Every little detail is taken care of. In crazy clips about love, imprisonment, pursuit, escape, etc., the audience can laugh out loud. However, the story finally ushered in a sad ending, because this virtual country still travels in real time. ——From the peaceful and orderly year of 1932, it gradually entered the age of irration, until the war that swept the world came.
The Grand Budapest Hotel, which used to be mainly pink-or you can understand it as an abstraction of the old European world-was occupied as a wartime military command, with flags painted with the "ZZ" logo hung everywhere (this is too obvious Reminiscent of the "SS" of the Nazi SS). The celebrities and nobles who had gone in and out had turned into armed forces of various factions holding guns in the hallways. And Gustav, who had just escaped from prison and was still here, still tried to protect the dignity of his friends and subordinates in a gentleman manner, but was killed without hesitation by the guerrillas holding guns. The inherent order and laws are no longer effective, beauty and goodness become weak and weak, violence and tyranny swept everything. Gustav and the class he represented, as well as the world and era in which they lived, fell together.
At the end of the film, the director puts a line of subtitles: "Inspired by Stephen Zweig's work." Oh, that's it. Zweig's "Yesterday's World" is a deep sigh of the burial of Nazi brutality and war in the old European continent. And he himself, even though he is already in South America, is still ashamed of "my mother tongue has become a language that distorts and destroys the world", because the spiritual homeland of the intellectual aristocracy has been lost and desperate, he and his wife in 1942 Suicide together.
I think this film is a tribute to Zweig by the director. The writer in the film is called "our national treasure", and it probably means Zweig as the prototype. At the end of the film, the four timelines are closed one by one, just like the memory box layered on top of each other, after a fantasy display, quietly sealed again. Yesterday’s world can’t be reproduced, so it’s okay to paint a beautiful dream with images and relive it.
View more about The Grand Budapest Hotel reviews
