Blimey, I was
absolutely delighted! These are the reasons why:
Foreword - I had
no background information about the director or the plot (which I reckon is
based on a book). Thus, I shall present you only with direct impressions
concerning the movie.
Firstly, the cast
– well, it seemed over-starred in the poster but in the actual film each of the
renowned face had about five minutes maximum to star on the screen. It would be
rather pointless to describe the plot, for it is quite convoluted and
surprisingly insignificant. What makes the film worth praising is the humor, although no scene was
hysterically funny, it was all rather “sweet”, witty humor edging towards absurdity. There were some funny bits that require good background
knowledge for understanding, for instance, the manager of the Grand Budapest
(Ralph Fiennes) is to inherit a painting called Boy With Apple, he goes to a
lounge in a big house to pick it up where there are other paintings, he remarks
that everything apart from Boy With Apple is a “worthless piece of shit”,
removes his heritage off the wall and, not to leave a blank patch on the wall,
replaces it with an erotic painting by Egon Schiele, then runs down a
passageway and we can distinctly see a picture of Gustave Klimt’s somewhere on
the floor – by the way, has anybody ever heard of Boy With Apple?
An important feature of this movie is, of course, metatextuality. What the
heck is that? Well, it means that there’s a story within a story (perhaps within
a story within a story – yes! this is actually The Grand Hotel Budapest’s
case), or, as Lisa once patiently explained to her father Homer Simpson, “like
when you’re watching TV and in the TV, there are people who are watching TV”. However, the
audience can easily orientate in the plot even though the main character’s -
Gustave H (Ralph Fiennes, yes, I believe this was the main character) –
storyline is the “forth TV”; in other words, the fourth layer of perspective.
I do not find my
review very convincing, I was dreading writing it but I hope you understand my
enthusiasm somehow. What is the most valuable thing for me, is that the setting
is Central Europe, there are associations that the American audience can hardly
work out and that the movie, despite its production and cast, is not very
Hollywood-like as you would think.
Matěj Vašíček
