jazzeum
Four Star General
- Joined
- Apr 23, 2005
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The Grand Budapest Hotel is a movie that takes place in the fictional country Zubrowka but is actually somewhere in the old Austrian-Hungarian Empire. The events of the movie, which takes place in 1932, although the story is told from the viewpoint of the 1980s centers around the fortune left by an old lady, deftly played by Tilda Swinton, who was often a guest at the Grand Budapest Hotel, to the Hotel's proprietor, Monsieur Gustave, played by Ralph Fiennes.
The movies has aspects of a madcap comedy in the style of the Marx Brothers and Ernst Lubitsch but the secret of the movie and its virtue is found in the closing credits when the director Wes Anderson says "inspired by the works of Stefan Zweig."
Stefan Zweig, who was born in Austria and who lived from 1881 to 1942 when he and his wife committed sucide in Brasil, is not that well known today (although he is making a comeback and the movie is helping in that regard) but in his time in the 20s and 30s, he was one of the most famous authors of his day.
Wes Anderson says that the movie was inspired by Zweig's memoir The World of Yesterday and his only novel Beware of Pity. The World of Yesterday was written when he was in exile from the Nazis and shows the collapse of the world as it was in then after WWI, the rise of Hitler and the fall of Europe.
Although the movie is a madcap comedy, through the eyes of the narrator (played by Jude Law) as he talks to the present owner of the Hotel in the 1980s, Mr. Mustafa (played by F. Murray Abraham), we see the decline of the Hotel from what it was in the 1930s, just as Zweig evoked the decline of a European world that was ceasing to exist in the 1930s.
Zweig, after the Nazis came to power, chose to leave Austria (although he was not then in peril) and in effect became a stateless person and in the movie we see that played out in the Lobby Boy, Zerom who has no travel documents, which sets the scene for a climactic moment towards the end of the movie with the police who are, in effect, Nazi thugs.
It's Zweig who makes this movie worth seeing.
The movies has aspects of a madcap comedy in the style of the Marx Brothers and Ernst Lubitsch but the secret of the movie and its virtue is found in the closing credits when the director Wes Anderson says "inspired by the works of Stefan Zweig."
Stefan Zweig, who was born in Austria and who lived from 1881 to 1942 when he and his wife committed sucide in Brasil, is not that well known today (although he is making a comeback and the movie is helping in that regard) but in his time in the 20s and 30s, he was one of the most famous authors of his day.
Wes Anderson says that the movie was inspired by Zweig's memoir The World of Yesterday and his only novel Beware of Pity. The World of Yesterday was written when he was in exile from the Nazis and shows the collapse of the world as it was in then after WWI, the rise of Hitler and the fall of Europe.
Although the movie is a madcap comedy, through the eyes of the narrator (played by Jude Law) as he talks to the present owner of the Hotel in the 1980s, Mr. Mustafa (played by F. Murray Abraham), we see the decline of the Hotel from what it was in the 1930s, just as Zweig evoked the decline of a European world that was ceasing to exist in the 1930s.
Zweig, after the Nazis came to power, chose to leave Austria (although he was not then in peril) and in effect became a stateless person and in the movie we see that played out in the Lobby Boy, Zerom who has no travel documents, which sets the scene for a climactic moment towards the end of the movie with the police who are, in effect, Nazi thugs.
It's Zweig who makes this movie worth seeing.
