The Grand Budapest Hotel
Written by: Sam Henry Miller
The Grand Budapest Hotel may not be the perfect film, but it may well be the perfect motion picture. An hour-n-a-half anthology of meticulously composed portraits, each one more than a thousand words affluent, can probably take this cake.
The Grand Budapest seizes cinema’s essential dial—indexical-photography spun at 24 frames per second—and cranks it to the max, concocting an optical-orgasm for formal film-buffs, just short of saccharine kitsch, but too far to claim complement from any other formal-filmic element (music, acting, writing). It’s a peculiar kind of one-note piece—the same note that conceived cinema historically and sustains film study today. From this sole note, as a prism would to light, Wes Anderson refracts a picturesque symphony.
Above all, The Grand Budapest is about portraiture. So much so, that we are treated to three distinctframing devices before we even touch the main narrative. Our story proper follows the escapades of the eccentric concierge M. Gustave and his green lobby boy, Zero, sometime during pre-WWII era Germany. It’s a bromance, a dark comedy, a murder mystery, a prison-break, a farce and a score of other plot-qualifiers that suffice to describe the film as well as “oval” does a lemon. The important details are simply elsewhere; cinematography, lighting and (especially) color are what illustrate The Grand Budapest.
And what illustrate the cinematography, lighting and color is a filmmaker with not just vision but visualization, rigour and prestige enough to pain an entire film crew with perfectionism—a sort of a Machiavellian-director, we must assume. Wes Anderson treats every shot strictly as a portrait. If the depth of field is racked into full focus (deep space), he stratifies meaning into each layer of the shot (foreground, center, background) with deliberate prop mise-en-scene, color, blocking and lighting. If a long shot is shallow spaced, he will go for uncanny symmetry or wide angles. If it’s a high angle shot, he’ll set up his actors like a chess board; most of whom are cameo pawns anyway—a humble acknowledgement, perhaps, to an artist far more brilliant than themselves.
Anderson’s use of color on characters, about spaces and via filters cannot be overstated. A synesthetic eruption of sight and taste is evoked as one’s eyes savor coats of primary colors meretriciously implemented either subtly or overwhelmingly—’hint of mint’ or ‘fruit explosion’, but little else in-between. In other words, Anderson’s use of color is not just motion of the picturesque, as aforementioned, but specifically motion of the portrait-esque: moving paintings, or alternatively, a cartoon.
Yes, The Grand Budapest Hotel is the first live-action un-illustrated cartoon. This means no CGI (save a few sequences that use it to mimic miniaturization [anti-CGI, in a sense]) and no rotoscoping (drawing over the photo). Anderson illustrates the indexical using negligible amounts of post-processing. Instead, he pre-processes, completing each of his paintings mentally before they even reach the cutting room floor.
This technique is, in theory at least, a paradox of Escher-esque proportions. Cartoons are symbolic, meaning that they emphasize features impressionistic of an icon (a ‘real’ thing). A photograph is indexical, meaning that it mimics icons uncannily, barring only their auratic qualities (qualities of their physical presence). So just what are we to make of a symbolic index? Practically speaking, it’s an oxymoron and utter nonsense, but Anderson puts it into practice and makes it make sense—pleasurably and with finesse. Why this is just so pleasurable may remain as much a mystery as synesthesia itself. When you can only describe what red looks like or what sour tastes like relatively, what chance have you to describe their synthesis?
Ultimately, the value of The Grand Budapest Hotel to the cinematic canon of exceptionalism lies contingent on an ancient, academic ideology’s ability to reform: that “a perfect film shows and does not tell”, or alternatively: the ideal film is told solely with motioned pictures. So what of motioned indexical symbols? Not moving drawings nor moving photos, but a highly organized hybrid, a live-action cartoon…
Well, while film scholars argue endlessly the merit of this form, I’ve already come to a conclusion. It has something to do with the ‘thousand-word-spouting’ ability of the indexical colliding with the impressionistic poignancy of the symbolic coupled with a personal attraction towards fusions of the logically dichotomous. After all, it’s how you and I were made, and the birth of something unique is an intrinsically beautiful thing, ain’t it?