Hints of History in “The Grand Budapest Hotel”

Wes Anderson’s film, “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” is a confectionery dollhouse of a film. Really though. The main love interest (Saoirse Ronan) works in a confectionery shop and Anderson created an actual miniature house to film some of the shots of the titular hotel. The film is bathed in pinks and purples and reds, and tells the story of the charming, dedicated hotel concierge M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes) as he fights to claim the inheritance left to him by one of his beloved clients (Tilda Swinton) from her villainous son (Adrien Brody).

But underneath all that Wes Anderson-ian whimsy is a far darker film, as the director situates the tale of M. Gustav and his protégé, Zero, in a 1930s Eastern Europe swept up in WWII.

“The Grand Budapest Hotel” does not take place in actual Budapest, but in and near a town called Lutz (as in the figuring skating jump) in a fictional Eastern European country Zubrowka. Anderson explained to NPR that “Lutz” is Vienna, Prague and Budapest “all rolled into one,” and the film’s political backdrop is an amalgamation of the two world wars.

“Part of why I feel the impulse to re-imagine [the time], rather than just do it [more literally], is because it’s been done so many times before; this is such familiar historical territory,” he said, adding he was inspired by Austrian writer Stefan Zweig (also given writing credit on IMDb), whose literary career peaked in the 1920s and 1930s.

“The Grand Budapest Hotel” historical references are even more overt, as the circumstance of WWI and WWII meet them in the middle in a fictional mid-1930s conflict. The geopolitical events are set in motion by what appears to Franz Ferdinandeqsue monarchy crisis. But it’s a fascist force, a la WWII’s Axis powers, that is sweeping through M. Gustav’s world.

As Anderson explained, his decision to take on history in the film, “You know, the reason I want to engage with it is because this series of events in Europe are somehow still right in the middle of our lives.” And his candy-colored coating of it in “The Grand Budapest Hotel” ultimately brings out its melancholy.