THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL

Not here, not today, a world away …

«The Grand Budapest Hotel» is a refreshing, off-beat comedy about the charming concierge Gustave H. and his faithful bellhop Zero Moustafa. Together they take a turbulent trip through a fictitious Europe in the 1930s, during which Gustave is accused of murder and the two are both on the run from the police. The film, with its star-studded cast and unique visual aesthetic, is an artistic masterpiece that will make you think and laugh.

Mutual inspiration:

The Hotel Walther for Stefan Zweig’s novel “The Post Office Girl” and the novel for the film «The Grand Budapest Hotel»

The Plot

The film is set in the Alpine Republic of Zubrowska. The authoritative concierge of the Grand Budapest Hotel, Monsieur Gustave H., experiences the pulsating life of the Roaring Twenties at first hand. He soon takes on a new bellhop, Zero Moustafa, and initiates his young protegé into the secrets of his profession. Then the elderly Madame D. suddenly dies and her surviving relatives, who have been cheated out of their inheritance, are not entirely happy with the deceased's will. Gustave H. and his faithful bellhop become embroiled in an adventure involving a stolen Renaissance painting, a vast family fortune and the dark historical upheavals of their time.

The Grand Hotel As The Setting

The Grand Budapest Hotel plays a central role in the film. It is portrayed as a place of beauty, luxury and refined elegance. It symbolises a lost world of glamour and romance that gets caught off-guard by the impending threat of war and violence. The hotel serves as a refuge, an oasis of hope in the midst of a chaotic and unsafe world. It embodies the idea of a nostalgic look at the past and a longing for better times.

Success And Awards

The off-beat comedy was screened in a competition at the Berlinale Film Festival in 2014 and celebrated its world premiere in February. Director Wes Anderson's film won the Grand Jury's Silver Bear. In January 2015, The Grand Budapest Hotel was nominated for nine Oscars (including best picture, best cinematography, best director, best editing, best original screenplay) making it one of the most nominated films of the year. Four of the category nominations went straight to the top –costume design, make-up and hairstyling, production design and music all won Oscars.

Inspiration

In the credits of The Grand Budapest Hotel, Wes Anderson cites the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig as an inspiration. For him, the Austro-Hungarian monarchy before the First World War was a kind of lost paradise, where he himself led a luxurious lifestyle as a member of Vienna's «Fin de Siècle» intellectual elite. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, his books were burned and he was expelled from the German-speaking world. In 1938, when Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany, he fled to England. In 1941 he moved to tropical Brazil. He turned his memories of the past into two books that could have been the template for The Grand Budapest Hotel: “The World of Yesterday” and “The Post Office Girl”, in which a luxury hotel in Pontresina is described as an island of happiness whose fortunes are guided by the concierge.

… AS LUCK WOULD HAVE IT

The hotel described above is the Palace in Pontresina. In the early 1930s, you might have seen an elegantly dressed gentleman busily scribbling in his notebook. In his later novel, Stefan Zweig created a monument to the Hotel Walther. The story of Christine, a postal worker who is invited to the Engadin and becomes addicted to luxury, eventually became the inspiration for director Wes Anderson’s film “The Grand Budapest Hotel”. However, any similarities to living or deceased persons or to the architecture of the Hotel Walther are purely coincidental.