Pastels and Panache in Wes Anderson’s ‘Grand Budapest’

‘His world had vanished long before he ever entered it, but he certainly sustained the illusion with remarkable grace’.

Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel unfolds like a Mendel’s cake box. The pink box, tied with blue ribbon, opens to reveal patisserie towers iced in pastel colours. Inside the cakes, we soon learn, are concealed the miniature tools which, in a glorious timpani, dig their way to M. Gustave’s freedom, and his brief spell as a fugitive in the mountaintops of Eastern Europe. The aesthetic appeal of the packaging and the cake serve as a distraction from the hard metal objects concealed within: style overcomes substance.

This film follows the adventures of M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes), taking place during the outbreak of WWII which, it transpires, is not so much a backdrop as a footnote to the Grand Budapest and the events unfolding in the lives of Gustave and his lobby boy (a job-title which, in this film, is inexplicably loaded with innuendo), Zero. The mysterious death of a beloved patroness, her family of cartoon villains, armed with deep pockets and a cat-splatting hit-man, the not-so-mysterious disappearance of a mysterious painting and a secret guild of hoteliers: all of this takes centre stage for Anderson, and the brief, sudden instances of on-screen violence are but a comic imitation (perhaps not even that) of the real violence that will soon spread across the continent.

This is Anderson’s gift, perhaps his project: to make tragedy peripheral but ever-present, and to sustain the illusion of civilization with such finesse that the illusion itself comes to bear a kind of truth. Anderson’s fascination with symmetry is also a fascination with man’s pursuit of perfection. The adventures of Gustave, remnants of a golden era, are shot in 4:3 aspect ratio – almost (but not quite) square, and often almost (but never quite) symmetrical. The sweeping lobby of the Grand Budapest, Mendel’s towering creations, Zero himself: life gets in the way of perfect symmetry. It is Gustave’s vocation to alter the aesthetics, to straighten and polish and pamper the imperfections of the world into something not quite perfect but at least pleasant, smelling, if not of roses, then of l’Air de Panache. Perhaps more than any other character in Anderson’s works, Gustave can be identified with the director himself: both men make it their purpose to rearrange the world, to render it palatable.

To those critics who accuse Anderson of being too obsessed with surface detail, of prioritizing style at the expense of substance, I would suggest that this decision is entirely deliberate. Tragedy is all too easy to come by. It is the job of artists to carve a narrative from the mess of life, to organize the world. That the central narrative of Grand Budapest is so neatly contrived is a deliberate decision – this is Anderson acknowledging that art is exempt from the rules and limitations of real life. In a film, a villain will be pushed off a cliff in the nick of time; in a film, on more than one occasion, the weakest of men (or women) can bear his (or her) own body weight, dangling from a precipice, with just the tips of sweaty fingers, until he or she is pulled to safety. But it is this quality of easy contrivance that allows the central narrative of Anderson’s film to act as such a beautiful juxtaposition to the realities (the war, the dysentery, the untimely deaths of both Agata and Gustave) constantly gnawing at the edges of Anderson’s creation, demanding to be portrayed. This juxtaposition is enacted on an aesthetic as well as a dramatic level: the pastel grading of the model hotel and its royal purple interior throws into stark relief the brown/beige of Cold War Dubrowka, and the solitary, black and white scene – Gustave’s last – which not only provides symmetry with the earlier, almost identical scene, also in a train carriage stopped by the German police, but also discloses nostalgia for an era now vanished.

It might be said that Gustave takes too central a role in Grand Budapest, causing other characters to appear increasingly peripheral, too closely resembling caricatures. Ralph Fiennes carries his role with such elegance, losing his composure with such sudden, controlled hilarity, that it is difficult to watch Grand Budapest without feeling that every other character (not just Zero) is little more than a stooge to the great Gustave. But perhaps this is the point: that these complexities exist only in tangental relation to the central narrative of the film. F Murray Abraham’s Zero (the older Zero, who now haunts the backstairs and oversized baths of the crumbling Grand Budapest) carries the weight of his loss – the deaths of Agata and their infant child – with a sadness so understated that it is somehow more poignant than consuming grief. Anderson does not seek to expound or labour the tragedies of his subjects (whether private or public) – rather he openly and willingly acknowledges that these characters exist in a space in which they are temporarily freed from the struggles and limitations of reality: the big screen.

Fictions of Narrative: crime drama and ‘The Wire’

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Motherfucker. Fuck. 

Not since the opening scene of Richard Curtis’s Four Weddings and a Funeral has so much been communicated in that single syllable, uttered with mounting incredulity by Baltimore detectives McNulty and Bunk in Old Cases, Episode 4, Season 1 of HBO’s The Wire. Dismissive, incredulous, revelatory: the word ‘fuck’ adapts to the demands of the speaker at any given moment, and it is this versatility that affords it both hilarious inadequacy and understated gravity.

In this scene narrative is constructed not in words but in action: the squeak of the marker pen, the flick of a tape measure, a series of wise looks and knowing ‘fuck’s that communicate incredulity, revelation and a sorrow grown so cold with experience it is only just discernible. The use of the word fuck in this scene, constitutes a departure from (as well as a dig at) the conventional structure of the crime-scene scene of crime drama. It is the task of a crime writer, whether Agatha Christie or David Simon, to do as a police detective does and construct a narrative around the crime scene: to read the cuts, bruises and bullet wounds etched upon a corpse, the shattered window panes, the fingerprints and the footprints as the signs that lead back to an original act of violence and a perpetrator.

Forensic crime drama in particular, but really all crime drama and fiction, is based on the assumption that a corpse is legible, and that the act of reading and interpreting the signs of  both the body and crime scene is the foundation of justice.

There is something both ethical and naive about this assumption, and it is this assumption that The Wire, not only in this scene but throughout, seeks to shatter. Justice is not a question of scientific evidence but of politics, of persuasion and of luck. The ‘fuck’ that punctuates the scene in dead Deirdre’s empty kitchen is an expression not just of comic inexpressibility but of frustration and resignation that encapsulates the war on drugs and organized crime – inextricable, as writer David Simon elucidates in subsequent seasons of the show, from high level corruption and greed. The Wire slowly dismantles the sweet illusion upon which the appeal of crime drama depends: that the ability to construct a narrative around death is equivalent to justice. It is a modern form of metaphysical comfort that allows a viewer to cushion him or herself in the reassurance that, although a crime has been committed, the perpetrator will eventually be identified and therefore differentiated and excluded from civilized society.

In drama, a corpse (or part of a corpse) demands one of two reactions: eloquence or speechlessness. In Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Titus receives the severed heads of his two sons with a pair of woefully inadequate monosyllables. Titus’ ‘Ha! Ha!‘ signals the breakdown of narrative and the realization that neither knowledge nor eloquence nor art can compensate for pain. It is a catharsis that lacks expression. Old Cases is perhaps comparable – posing a similar challenge to the possibility of constructing a narrative around suffering. ‘Fuck’ has something in common with ‘Ha! Ha!’ not only because of the incongruous comedy but also because of the level of detachment it reveals in these characters who have been exposed (or exposed themselves) to so much violence that they no longer seek the redeeming comforts of eloquent expression.

But why ‘fuck’? What is it about this particular expletive that makes it so adept at challenging the underlying assumptions of crime drama, and the justice system as a whole? One answer is its universality. ‘Fuck’, or a variation thereof, is the preferred expletive of not only the Baltimore police force but of gangsters, slingers and addicts alike: ‘fuck’ transcends. Amongst other things, it is the word ‘fuck’ that betrays the Baltimore police to be as flawed, both comically and tragically, as the criminals they are pursuing. There is no clean divide between cops and robbers, only chains of command in which the lower ranks are continuously chewed up and spat out by their superiors, and in which individuals are valued only according to their usefulness. Addiction (to money, drugs, sex, alcohol) is the ruling force, and ‘fuck’ is that precious expletive that communicates so concisely the frustrated realization of the powerlessness that results from existence within a system that runs on greed and self-interest.

Of the characters on the street only Omar, the shotgun-wielding Robin Hood of West Baltimore, restricts his language to avoid expletives. This is perhaps reflective of his nomadic status, and his own ethical code that allows him to kill, steal and lie but will not allow him to raise his gun to a civilian. It is Omar’s ethical code that exempts him from the demands of greed, and allows him to operate outside the capitalist system that transforms people into commodities to be acquired and consumed.

McNulty and Bunk do eventually get their man, but the triumph of this conviction is undermined by Wee-bey’s willingness to confess to a long list of murders he did not convict in exchange for a beef and horseradish sandwich, putting forensics on a par with condiments in terms of judicial clout. With astounding verbal economy, the 3 and half minute scene in Old Cases poses an indirect challenge to the assumptions about justice and narrative upon which the universal appeal of crime drama depends. ‘Fuck’, already a loaded expression, comes to encapsulate both the revelation of powerlessness and the powerlessness of this revelation. In The Wire, the central characters are forced to abandon the consolatory narratives constructed around the site of suffering and, instead, plunged deeper into the cycle of violence.