Being a lover of aesthetics, it’s always a pleasure to watch a Wes Anderson film. I’ve only ever seen The Darjeeling Limited, which I recommend to everyone (it’s a wonderful movie).
With The Grand Budapest Hotel, I found it interesting how Wes Anderson chose to color grade the film using an intentionally fantastical, storybook-like color palette. As is part of his style, I believe that the whimsical color palette was made to contrast some more serious commentary on tragedy and class.
M. Gustave, in particular, served as my favorite representation of Anderson’s thematic commentary on class. One of his earlier lines that resulted in Dmitri delivering him a blow to the nose, (“I go to bed with all my friends”), wasn’t just for comedy, but served to hint at how M. Gustave was always servile to elite and uber-wealthy women in many more ways than one. More than just a concierge, M. Gustave was a close friend to many aristocrats, giving them personal attention in exchange for better treatment and connections. But even though he acts exactly like the European elite (down to the posh accent), at the end of the day, we see that he’s nothing more than just a concierge who floats around on the margins of wealthier spaces. He doesn’t belong to the unemployed elite, but neither does he belong to the plebeian working class (seen in his dynamic with Zero).
I found this a cool note; in many of the first scenes in the film, Anderson incorporated a shade of insanely brilliant red that I later found to have likely foreshadowed the tragedy of Madame Céline’s death. See in Figure 1 and 2, how the lift and the carpets in the hotel are all unmistakably blood-red:
Figure 1
Figure 2
A question that I want to pose to the class as a Viewer is introduced in my blog title. TGBH is a story within a story all told by several different narrators, which we’re immediately notified of at the beginning of the film. The initial narrator sets the story in motion, but then quickly hands off the narration to the older version of Zero. I believe that this was a choice made with intention, and that we as viewers should consider whether the story might have progressed through time perhaps like a game of Telephone. Are we getting the most accurate version of events, or could some of the more outlandish parts of this film be totally embellished? Is this something we should even be considering? I theorize that Wes Anderson wanted to frame this story using this specific structure in order to leave some commentary on the potential unreliability of narrators (particularly when they’re narrating what seems to be one of the most exciting things that’s ever happened to them, as with Zero). Though Anderson didn’t style the narration this way in The Darjeeling Limited, I have read that he does this in some of his other films, which I’m eager to watch.
– Ria
To me, the use of color in “The Grand Budapest Hotel” stuck out as nothing if not bizarre. While I hadn’t initially considered its connection to tragedy and class, the emotion provoking effect of color certainly proves this point. The red elevator scene with Madame stuck with me, but I wasn’t sure why beyond the intensity of the elevator’s color. Seeing the still shot of the scene, and Madame D’s extravagant red garb, I see a clear allusion to her timely death just a few scenes later. The other powerful colors in the hotel convey a sense of luxury and identification with high class which is only undercut by the declining state of the hotel, a tragedy within itself. This fetishization of old wealth is central to the movie’s plot and of course Gustav’s character. Much like Gustav is drawn to the old but brightly colored and decorated Grand Budapest Hotel, the same could be said for his taste in women. Whether the narration is true to an actual story is hard to say, but the fantastical use of color and other elements of Mise-en-scène certainly contribute to a storybook like narration in which credibility is hard to determine. Much like the setting of the movie, I think the narration invites the viewer to fill in some gaps and sit back into a fantastical show of color and extravagance.-Jack
The idea of the color palette contrasting some more serious ideas I agree with. I also think that one of the reasons Anderson used the vibrant color palette was to mask how serious some of the topics in the movie are, as well as to heighten the contrast between good and bad characters. The film deals with very serious topics and some heavily violent scenes. For example, when Willem Dafoe gets his fingers chopped off or when Zero is attacked by the soldier, the lighting and overall tone of the movie have set up a more joyous and vibrant environment causing viewers to not see this as dark as it is. I had never considered the idea of unreliable narration in this film. I think Wes Anderson did want to leave the idea of unreliable narrators up in the air; however, I felt that because the author never questions Zero’s story, the narration is not something we question at first glance. I wondered why Wes Anderson told the story through three different times and what it accomplished for the story. Another thought is that Wes Anderson potentially used the outlandish color palette to reflect a sort of dream or distorted sense of reality, similar to the distortion of the story that has been passed down/told through an unreliable narrator.