Old Yorker

  • The Grand Budapest Hotel

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Wes Anderson (2014)

    It’s just as I expected, except that I enjoyed it.  One of the posters for the film comprises cigarette card portraits of its many characters:  the portraits anticipate the design of The Grand Budapest Hotel – stylishly neat, pretty, one-dimensional.  This goes not only for the look of the eponymous hotel, inside and outside:  even the alpine landscapes, beautiful as they are, have a pictorial flatness.  At one point Gustave H, the hotel concierge and the principal character, says to his protégé, the young lobby boy Zero Moustafa:  ‘The plot thickens – by the way, why is that: is it a soup metaphor?’  The plot of this crime caper is consommé.  Because Wes Anderson’s tone is fundamentally facetious the worst moments of his movies tend to occur when you’re meant to take things more seriously – whether this involves human feeling or bloodshed or some kind of energetic physical action, like a chase.   There’s actually quite a lot of chasing in The Grand Budapest Hotel – Gustave H is framed for a murder – and it’s mildly entertaining but the world that Anderson constructs is too shallow to accommodate violent death.  (It’s different with the pet animal killings that have become an Anderson trademark:  the repetition alone is enough to make you feel they matter to him.)

    The screenplay and story, by Anderson with Hugo Guinness, are inspired by the works of Stefan Zweig, a man not considered superficial either in his writings or in the manner of his death.  Zweig left Austria after Hitler came to power and eventually settled in Brazil: despairing for the future of Europe and European culture under Nazism, Zweig and his wife committed suicide in 1942.   The Grand Budapest Hotel is set in a fictional mittel-European state called Zebrowka in the inter-war years.  This era is said to have been the hotel’s heyday but the strong Austro-Hungarian Empire flavour naturally evokes an earlier time and the imprecision of the nostalgia is revealing, given Anderson’s meticulous approach to matters of design.   The exterior of the hotel in its prime suggests an elaborate cake, with floors of pink and white icing; and when Gustave, with a group of other prisoners, escapes from jail, they use tools concealed inside cakes made by Zero’s girlfriend Agatha, who works in Mendl’s, the finest patisserie in Zubrowka.  Mendl’s products are emblematic of Wes Anderson’s cinema – elaborate and even mouth-watering to look at but soon indigestible.  The story moves back in time from the 1980s to the 1930s via a short interlude in 1968, when the unlovely colouring of the hotel interiors, browns and yellows, encapsulates its fall from grace (Zubrowka is presumably by now a communist state) – yet it still looks more designed than real.

    It’s no coincidence that Anderson’s best film remains Fantastic Mr Fox, where you didn’t expect believable, complex people but where the finicky detail of the visual world and the richness of the vocal characterisations of the animals created a one-off satisfying blend.  The Darjeeling Limited and Moonrise Kingdom are the two of his movies that have most got on my nerves – in these films, the people are meant to be people but mostly come across as arch confections.   The Grand Budapest Hotel is full of character types:  the pleasure of the film is that the talents of the actors, who are plainly having a ball, make vivid individuals out of these types.   (In contrast, the signature pet death is less real and distressing than usual – it’s a Persian cat, with a cartoon look, that perishes.)  The prime example is Ralph Fiennes as Gustave H.  Fiennes carries about him an ineradicable air of sadness but, as he showed recently when directing himself in The Invisible Woman, this quality can be intriguing if it’s embedded in an extravert character – if it’s what lies beneath an apparently jolly fellow.  The vitality of his acting here no doubt partly reflects Fiennes’s relish in doing something different from usual but his performance is finely controlled, nevertheless.  Anderson has supplied him with some good lines, which Fiennes handles with skilful comic timing – he’s especially good when a run of suave sentences is broken by an expletive:  this happens every so often, but not too often.  What’s more, Fiennes’s lack of star charisma actually makes Gustave H more interesting; the actor conveys both a carefully constructed front and an unreachable personality that’s kept from view.   Gustave is sexually promiscuous and eclectic (provided the partner is blonde their gender doesn’t matter) but the sex is virtually always happening behind closed doors, which seems right.

    It’s a pity that Tilda Swinton as the dowager Madame Céline Villeneuve Desgoffe-und-Taxis is the murderee – neurotically anxious under octogenarian make-up, Swinton is very funny for her few minutes on screen.   Edward Norton is repeatedly witty as a police inspector; F Murray Abraham has a depth as the elderly Zero Moustafa that’s mostly lacking elsewhere in the cast – although the newcomer Tony Revolori (seventeen years old), who plays the younger Zero and who partners Ralph Fiennes well, is able to suggest a potential for sadness.  Jude Law, as the author of a book about the hotel, is disappointingly vague – his voiceover is peculiarly toneless.  Bill Murray, Owen Wilson and Bob Balaban are an amusing team of lofty concierges, in various swanky hotels across the continent, who help Gustave in his hour of need; and Jason Schwartzman is likeable as one of Gustave’s successors, decades on, in the Grand Budapest.  Saoirse Ronan is charming as Agatha although the unhappy fate of this character is an instance of Anderson’s difficulties in accommodating real death into his scheme of things.  As Madame Céline’s vengeful son, Adrien Brody isn’t as funny, or as threatening, as he needs to be but Willem Dafoe does well as a hired assassin – his elaborately zipped and buttoned coat has surprising mileage as a running joke.   Mathieu Amalric and Léa Seydoux, the other non-native English speakers in this very international setting, are both effective too.   The cast also includes Jeff Goldblum, Harvey Keitel and Tom Wilkinson.  Another week, another Alexandre Desplat score but this one is a relief after The Monuments Men.

    12 March 2014

     

  • Mia Madre

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Nanni Moretti (2015)

    The main character in Mia Madre (My Mother) is Margherita (Margherita Buy), a film director.  At a press conference, a journalist suggests that Margherita has, unlike many of her contemporaries, continued to make films about social issues rather than with more personal themes.  The movie she is currently shooting is no exception:  it’s about an Italian factory and the impact on its workforce of an American entrepreneur, who takes the business over.  But while the subject of Margherita’s latest picture is socio-political, she is preoccupied on the shoot by what’s going on in her own life.   Her elderly mother Ada (Giulia Lazzarini), a retired classical scholar, is in hospital, and dying.  The tone of Mia Madre is gently elegiac as Nanni Moretti, who co-wrote the screenplay with Francesco Piccolo and Valia Santella, alternates scenes on the set of Margherita’s film with exchanges between her and other family members, at the hospital and in each other’s homes.  Moretti’s film is smooth, elegant, even-paced and unimaginative.   The profession of the protagonist naturally makes you wonder if Mia Madre is autobiographical; if it is, that may partly explain the piece’s restraint.  The parent-at-death’s-door storyline speaks to the personal experience of many of us:  since that personal experience is likely to be enduringly powerful it may, for some people, add emotional meaning and turbulence to what’s on screen.   But, without this fortifying element supplied by the viewer’s own autobiography, Mia Madre is undernourished.  It brings to mind the title of Simone de Beauvoir’s memoir of her mother’s death, Une mort très douce – but de Beauvoir’s use of the word ‘gentle’ in the title was ironic.

    In the course of the story, Margherita learns from others some uncomfortable truths (or, at least, firmly held opinions) about the way she treats people and causes them to behave.  This beautiful, soft-featured woman is accused – chiefly by Vittorio (Enrico Ianniello), a man with whom she’s recently ended a relationship – of being cold and ungenerous.  She has a teenage daughter, Livia (Beatrice Mancini), from a marriage that failed.  The conversations in the film certainly suggest that Margherita lacks the humour of her shrewd, witty mother and her wry, defeated brother Giovanni (Moretti).  But there’s no real exploration of these family relationships and it’s less than clear why Margherita seems so lacking in confidence on the film shoot.  If this uncertainty as a director is meant to express the off-set tensions she’s struggling with, it’s both an obvious and an unpersuasive way of doing so.  Margherita wants her actors to inhabit the characters they’re playing but also to see them ‘standing beside’ their character.  This puzzles the actors but you want to hear more of what Margherita means, and it’s a letdown when she says she doesn’t really know.  Otherwise, the film-within-the-film sequences suggest that Margherita’s movie-making sensibility is uninterestingly conventional, except in one bizarre piece of casting.

    The role of the hard-nosed American boss is being played by Barry Huggins (John Turturro) – a caricature of an arrogant Hollywood star.  It’s surprising that Barry would be keen to work with Margherita unless he needed the work more badly than is suggested; it’s even more surprising that the supposedly sensitive, tasteful film-maker she’s meant to be would want this reliably unreliable egomaniac in her movie.  Mia Madre is such a civilised affair that Barry Huggins seems a gatecrasher but Nanni Moretti may have figured – not without reason – that he needed an injection of vulgar energy.  There were only a couple of bits of John Turturro’s performance as Barry that I liked.  The first was his baffled reaction when Margherita momentarily confides in this outsider about what’s happening in her personal life:  she asks – almost imploring him for an answer – what will happen to her mother’s volumes of Lucretius and Tacitus when she’s dead.  The second was Turturro’s dance at a celebration of Barry’s birthday that Margherita’s film crew arrange.  Plenty of other people in Curzon Richmond, however, sounded as if they were enjoying Turturro’s turn more continuously – they were probably relieved by its crude vitality, just as Moretti intended.

    Most of the playing in Mia Madre is a good deal subtler than this:  Giulia Lazzarini and Moretti himself are particularly good.  There are some acutely observed moments.  Margherita buys food for Ada before visiting her in hospital but puts this special treat back in her bag as soon as Giovanni, who’s also visiting, automatically takes the lead in deciding their mother’s menu for the evening.   Staying in Ada’s apartment, Margherita opens the door to a young salesman from an electricity company.  He’s pushy enough to insist that Margherita find one of her mother’s electricity bills as evidence of how much less she’d pay if she changed suppliers; in the process of searching for a bill, Margherita becomes so upset that the salesman is soon anxious to escape.  Margherita’s rueful but conscientious selection of the right dress for Ada to wear in her coffin is touching and convincing.  But the calmly melancholy rhythm of the film’s movement mutes the distressing substance of Mia Madre.  Even Margherita’s anxious daydreams and nightmares seem to be integrated into the thin, decorous texture.

    1 October 2015

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