Anderson: The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

Ever since The Royal Tenenbaums, Wes Anderson’s films have progressed architecturally as much as cinematically – there haven’t been any great changes or developments in his directorial style, just micro-refinements and micro-adjustments, in response to each new space or structure that he encounters. That has made for a peculiarly timeless filmography, full of spaces that seem to hold time in abeyance, or at least keep it poised, precariously, at their cusps and thresholds. On the one hand, The Grand Budapest Hotel takes that to its logical conclusion – endowed with no less than four narrators, all the burden of storytelling is lifted from Anderson’s tableaux, which are now devoted entirely to spatial elaboration and fixation. None of his previous films feel so collapsed into their sets, or demand as much awe for their sets as sets – even the actual locations feel crafted, monuments to the film’s auteurist ambition. At the same time, though, something new starts to break through – it is as if an elastic band had been stretched to its extremity, and was just starting to feel the first, distant signs of relaxation, as Anderson’s most minute, obsessive mise-en-scenes to date are somehow combined with moments of real obscenity and atrocity, too anarchic to be contained by the architecture that seems to coax them into existence. Narratively, that makes for the first Anderson film in which space starts to feel genuinely threatened by time, by history – set in Eastern Europe on the eve of World War II, it’s about a concierge, played by Ralph Fiennes, who tries to keep his Indian pageboy, played by Tony Revolori, out of a Nazi prison. And if space without time is Anderson’s particular formula for white privilege, then that makes it feel a bit like he’s deracinating himself, or trying to escape his own style – it’s a prison escape film in every sense - perhaps explaining why his tracking-shots are so prominent and propulsive, or why his stilted, porcelain dialogue trembles with such vernacular restlessness. At those moments, it seems to promise a return to the Anderson of Bottle Rocket and Rushmore – that or a movement away from film altogether, perhaps towards architecture, cake decoration or dollhouse design, since it’s impossible to think of a more exquisitely plastic or confected cinema than what’s perfected here.