One of the things that really caught my eye in The Grand Budapest Hotel was the beautiful architecture of the hotel itself shown throughout the movie. As we learned, one of the main pieces of mise-en-scene is the setting of the film and Wes Anderson does a wonderful job of placing us within the hotel reminiscent of a french chateau commonly visited by the European elite in the 1930s.
As a searcher this week, I found this fascinating video from Architectural Digest of an architect breaking down the different components of the setting in TGBH: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tpnr6sKtccg
The video begins by dissecting the wide shot of a model hotel, which is one of the first hints to the viewer that the film will be veiled in fantasy.
He then goes on to contrast the actual Grand Budapest entrance scene with the model where the proportions are blatantly different, with the sign falling much lower above the door and the entrance appearing almost minuscule compared to the size of the establishment. As he mentions, this is the only door into this grand estate and seeing its small scale compared to the characters helps pull the viewer back into reality by noting the almost falsified grandeur of the hotel. Even in the entrance scene, we see that M. Gustave is framed as taller than the door which highlights his importance to the hotel. It also reinforces that patrons mainly come to TGBH to be ‘serviced’ by M. Gustave rather than for the hotel itself.
This sentiment is also reinforced for me with the dissection of the later remodel of the Grand Budapest, where the once fantastical pink, turreted hotel is shown as a beige, out-of-date, almost prison-esque structure. Without M. Gustave there to service the high paying patrons, the fantastical Grand Budapest has been converted to a simple hotel with even then name being simplified into an almost chain-like ‘GB’.
The video touches on many other interesting points of architecture and history throughout the film that allowed me to breakdown and understand the film through the small setting nuances, and I think it is a great resource to watch before our discussion tomorrow.