Why that first shot? Why show the director setting up the scenery, and not just show the scenery itself? I think the reasons behind this decision say a lot about Lubitsch as a filmmaker, and inform how we can think about Anderson also. The best directors create the worlds in which their films take place. And this goes beyond a cosmetic conception of “world” (i.e. physical settings, as in sci-fi movies), though with their made-up countries and hand-built miniatures Lubitsch’s and Anderson’s films also have this. But the worlds of the best directors also manifest their own attitudes and modes of representation. For Lubitsch and Anderson, part of the world is the sense of artificiality, the interaction between reality and artificiality, explicit in the case of The Doll, and implied in the case of Grand Budapest. Just as Lubitsch prefers his creation, Paris, Paramount, to the “real” Paris, Wes Anderson constructs his own worlds, worlds which reveal unmistakable signs of their own creation.

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A question that I think is important to consider here is this: what does it mean in the world of The Grand Budapest Hotel for something to be artificial? As an example, let’s consider our setting: the fictional nation of Zubrowka. Although the name of the hotel refers to a real city, and the film was shot mainly on location in Germany, the country of Zubrowka doesn’t exist, so we call it fictional. And in the first frame narrative, it makes sense to refer to Zubrowka as “fictional.” But once we get to the main story, past the other two frame narratives, does this classification still hold? To whom is the kingdom fictional? Certainly not to the girl, nor to The Author who tells us about the book that she’s reading, nor to the author who recalls his visit to the hotel which inspired the book, nor to Mr. Moustafa, who recounts the events that inspired the book to The Author, and certainly not to Zero, for whom Zubrowka was a refuge from his own (fictional?) homeland. Once the narration has been fractured and refracted, passed through these narrative channels, calling Zubrowka “fictional” no longer has any narrative or practical significance.

Part of this has to do with Anderson’s handling of The Audience, which changes in each successive frame narrative. In the first, we have a standard film to viewer relationship. We are in the real world, and the film we’re watching is fictional. In the second frame narrative, things get a little murkier. The author speaks directly to the camera, ostensibly to us, but since he only exists for us through his book, it’s really the Girl who’s his audience, making the camera a metaphor for the book itself. And since the Girl’s reading of the book serves as our entrance into The Author’s world, she always remains there as a buffer between us and this frame narrative. In the third frame narrative, the audience is even more nebulous. Though we’re presumably seeing what is written about in the book, the fact that we jump back in time to 1968, to a younger version of The Author, gives the impression that we’re now in the memory of The Author, contained in the book, which is read by the girl. Finally, the action of the story is recounted by Mr. Moustafa to the young Author. Working backward, the story is a memory of Zero, whose audience is The Author as a young man, whose audience is unclear but who exists as a memory of The Author as an older man, whose audience is both us (as he talks directly to the camera) and the girl reading the book, whose audience, finally, is us.

This is the most convoluted and confusing audience to film relationship I can remember experiencing. And maybe my explanation of it has made it more so. But in all this we see Anderson’s commitment to creating a world of complete artificiality; not only are the miniatures hand built to look deliberately artificial, not only are the compositions so perfectly ordered and minutely detailed, all the colors perfectly synched and complimentary in every frame — Anderson also constructs our relationship to the film, a relationship as utterly artificial as the nine-foot tall hotel where the film’s action takes place. In this way, Anderson’s world extends beyond the scope of the cinema screen to include the filmgoers watching it.

Near the end of the film, The Author asks Zero why he has kept the hotel, and if he’s trying to preserve the world that M. Gustave lived in. Zero says no, that M. Gustave’s world “had vanished long before he ever entered it. But I will say he certainly sustained the illusion with a marvelous grace.” He goes on to say that he keeps the hotel for his deceased wife, Agatha: “We were happy here — for a little while.” This idea of preservation is central to The Grand Budapest Hotel.

In essence, the entire film can be understood as a resurrection of the Grand Budapest Hotel. The hotel exists first as a notion, as something that a dead author would have written a nostalgic book about. Going through the frame narratives, it then transforms into a real thing, but something that only exists in memory, something to be recalled as an inspiration. Next, the hotel comes into existence, but as a husk of its former self, a derelict relic soon to be demolished. Then, finally, it is brought back to life in its perfect, fully realized form, depicted in vivid detail on the screen. But of course, implicit in all this is the knowledge that the hotel will die — it is, in fact, already dead. Although we can see it so beautifully rendered right in front of us, we also know that it is only alive through memory, put back together from notions and recollections, and that even while we watch what happened there, we know that the thing is long dead. In this sense, the artificiality of Anderson’s rendering makes sense — more so, it’s necessary. Passed through so many conduits, the world we’re seeing on screen is bound to feel false, to feel like a synthetic representation of the real thing; not only is it passed through the idealizing machine of memory, but details that are missing must be filled in, and thus can only be imitations. But this does not make them less real. Indeed, in the absence of our own memories of it, this fabricated replica is the only valid representation of this world that will never exist again. In this case, total artificiality is the only viable truth.

The idea of resurrection makes sense when you consider that death is all over Grand Budapest. The film takes place at the brink of a war that killed 2.5% of the world’s population, and the film is full of things and people that are already dead, are killed during the movie, or will be dead by the time we have seen the movie. These include The Author, Zero Moustafa, at least seven minor characters killed during the course of the film, M. Gustave, and, most importantly, Agatha. Indeed, the film begins with a girl paying her respects at The Author’s grave, and by the end of the film, she’s the only one who hasn’t died. The Grand Budapest Hotel, then, and its resurrection, represents not only itself, but the period in which it existed, including all those it contained, who were affected by its existence, or were themselves able to exist as they were because of the world that had created The Grand Budapest Hotel.

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A title at the end of The Grand Budapest Hotel reads “Inspired by the writings of Stefan Zweig.” I had never heard of Stefan Zweig, but I came across an article in The Telegraph, a transcript of a conversation between Anderson and George Prochnik, the biographer of Zweig, an extraordinarily popular Austrian Jewish writer of the early 20th century. In the article, Anderson and Prochnik discuss a book Zweig wrote called The World of Yesterday, a memoir which chronicles the decline of the refined and artistic culture of Eastern Europe, brought about by the two world wars and the rise of nationalism. As I understand it, the book attempted to recollect and celebrate those idyllic pre-war days. This seems to me the same notion behind Anderson’s film.

Prochnik describes Zweig’s passion as a collector of books, manuscripts, and musical scores: “There were friends of Zweig who saw him as invested before the war in creating almost a cabinet of curiosities, a museum of Europe — one person described it as a garden — that would serve as a microcosm of the whole vast continent before it all got blown asunder.” Similarly, Anderson is a collector. He collects actors to add to his cast of characters, anachronistic objects and instruments to use in his films, details and images to create textured compositions. Perhaps excepting his first film, Bottle Rocket (1994), this inclusion of outdated objects, the deliberateness, theatricality, and artificiality of his films, imbues all of Anderson’s work with the sense of having already happened. In this context, the melancholy that marks all of his films is inextricable from nostalgia, and becomes not just sadness, but a longing for the past, a past which we’re not sure exists except in the absence felt by Anderson’s characters and his films.

Again, Prochnik on Zweig: “There is the suggestion that the whole thing is a feat of imagination. I think this resonates with the embrace of illusion in The World of Yesterday. It gets away from the idea that Zweig was unable to see reality, and moves more towards the notion that he had a desire to live in the imagination so fully that it would diminish the impact of the real.”