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