Cinematic refuge, at your service

The film infolds in a comically elaborate nesting structure: the bulk of its story is told in flashback within flashback within flashback. It’s a way of making us conscious of how much memory and imagination have had their way with what we’re promised by the man known only as Author (Tom Wilkinson in one layer, Jude Law in another) is exacting in its fidelity to the true story. It’s also a way of emphasizing the distinctive balance between realism and artifice that Wes Anderson has been carefully cultivating over the last two decades. An elegy for a lost world that closely resembles but is not exactly our own—nostalgia for something that never was—The Grand Budapest Hotel might be the most perfect expression of that balance yet. 

Inspired by the work of Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig (1881-1942), much of the action is set in the 1930s, in the titular alpine hotel, itself nested in the fictional Zubrowka, a central European republic gradually sliding under the control of a thuggish foreign power à la Nazi Germany. Dark times loom, yet at the Grand Budapest all efforts are made to stall time, to maintain a rarified air. Its dandyish proprietor, M. Gustave H. (Ralph Fiennes), is especially devoted to his elderly wealthy female guests, whom he ensures are pampered in every way, including erotically, a duty he happily takes on himself. Over the course of the film Gustave will take the adolescent Middle Eastern refugee lobby boy Zero Moustafa (Tony Revolori) under his wing. The plot quickly thickens: one of Gustave’s cherished clients dies, leaving him an invaluable painting, stoking the ire of her ingrate sociopath son (Adrien Brody). Gustave is accused of murder, is actually guilty of theft, sort of, is imprisoned, breaks out of prison, goes on the lam and is forced to prove his innocence. All the while he and Zero become the closest of allies. “We’re brothers,” says Zero during a pivotal scene, echoing a key themes of nearly every Anderson movie. 

Colour-coordinated pageantry, over-abundant signage and streaming lateral movement through constructed sets in real places provide constant pleasure. The film is a stunning gallery of moustaches, from Zero’s penciled-on to what looks like a charcoal-drawn medieval gate framing Jeff Goldblum’s lovely mouth. The tone is madcap, mannered, an irreverent ode to effeminate men and sexual ambivalence, always rushing along at silent comedy speed, a hurried walk propelled by anxiety and terror yet tempered by a hilariously scrupulous formality. The low-affect performances from a cast teeming with beloved actors, many of them Anderson vets (Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, Willem Dafoe, F. Murray Abraham, Edward Norton and Harvey Keitel, to name a few), are uniformly sublime, Fiennes most of all. (Why does this guy not do more comedy?) 

The Grand Budapest Hotel keeps us aware always of the brutality and doom blackening its margins by working strenuously to downplay it—an approach more poignant than any direct or ostentatiously emotive alternative. A destination in its own right, as opposed an upscale crash-pad, the hotel is a refuge, a place where the linens are always crisp and the flowers fresh. Everything in this film is a form of refuge from hardship, conflict, loneliness: a lovingly sculpted pastry, a thoughtfully arranged room, a beautifully designed ski-chase sequence, a job well-executed and acknowledged as such, a proscenium that encases all the action, behaviour and opulence and never falls away. The elegant handmade craftsmanship of Anderson and his collaborators is here, at your service, in even the darkest hours. 

             

Mother daughter blood types

Byzantium begins with Eleanor Webb (Saoirse Ronan) writing the words “The End.” But for her there is no end. She turned revenant, or vampire, or soucriant—her preferred term, derived from Caribbean folklore—some 200 years ago, and is thus immortal, more or less, cursed to remain forever 16, forever on the cusp of womanhood. A natural storyteller in a film about storytelling, Eleanor is always writing her biography, throwing the pages to the wind, and beginning again. Sometimes a stray page will find itself in the hands of one curious enough to seek out its author. That’s a very dangerous curiosity to exhibit, but Byzantium, adapted by Moira Buffini from her play A Vampire Story, is in part a reminder that stories can be inherently dangerous things.

Director Neil Jordan’s second stab at a vampire story easily trumps its predecessor, 1994’s somewhat dull Interview With the Vampire, starring Tom Cruise. Working from Buffini’s far more cinematic script, Jordan strikes an appealing balance of narration and action, these two forces being embodied by his two protagonists, the melancholy, contemplative Eleanor, whose approach to satisfying her bloodlust typically puts her in the role of an angel of mercy, and Clara (Gemma Arterton), her beguiling, charismatic mother, a less discriminate killer, more pragmatic by both temperament and experience—she was forced into prostitution during the Napoleonic Wars and has kept it up as her go-to source of revenue ever since. Moving back and forth between past and present, between Eleanor’s voice-over narration and Clara’s adventures—the film opens with Clara in arresting lingerie giving a lap dance, busting a nose, being chased and sawing off someone’s head—Byzantium is a sensual gothic about the slippery frontier that separates appetite from need.

The title is drawn from the name of a dilapidated hotel located on a sumptuously gloomy English coast that Clara reopens for business as a brothel, though her enterprise is threatened once she begins to receive visits from some figures from her deep past. Ronan and Arterton are equally superb in their contrasting and complimentary roles, while Jordan deftly negotiates the story’s subtle shifts in tone, heightening atmosphere with weird storybook images of cabbage fields, dazzling scenes seen through mirrors and glass, lyrical spurts of blood, and a minimum of silly looking CG bats. 

             

Getting personal with computer

It’s 1980, and computers and larger than lawnmowers and not so personal—we had yet to figure out how to share a desk amicably. The gulf between man and machine was physically and psychically vast, which made the notion of a computer chess tournament that much more laden with unease and wonder.

Andrew Bujalski’s Sundance prize-winner unfolds within a Texas hotel where nerds from the nation over pit their chess-playing programs one against the other. Techno-tensions dictate both Computer Chess’ narrative and format, which is black and white video, 1.33, shot on the Sony AVC3260, a camera for which hard focus was apparently impossible. We actually see a videographer shooting the tournament and much behind-the-scenes material, which makes the film something of a quasi-faux-doc. There are overhead projectors, a lounge musician playing a buzzy electro-organ, and no ATMs where Michael Papageorge (Myles Paige) could, in theory, get some cash for the room, the drugs and the hooker he can’t pay for. There is an infestation of cats capable of operating elevators. There is also an encounter group that meets to reenact their births and dig their hands in warm bread—representatives of an earlier generation. Much of the film’s most resonant comedy comes from the way Bujalski underlines the ways in which computer geeks of the era were on the cutting edge of something they hardly understood while being seriously handicapped when it came to engaging in basic social activities. Though the videographer—the smartest geek in the room?—wisely predicts that one day computers will be used for dating.

Though an introverted child-Cronenberg lookalike (Patrick Riester) and a experimental psychologist (Slacker’s Wiley Wiggins) play key roles, Bujalski doesn’t favour any single character, preferring to let Computer Chess drift along as an affectionate, almost Altman-like ensemble/milieu piece. His characters have greasy hair, stains on their shirts, beards of resignation, outsized glasses and neglected physiques. Some of them get together in the evenings to smoke dope and swap big ideas about artificial intelligence or how this whole computer chess enterprise may just be grist for the military-industrial complex. Others are just trying to get friendly with the one young woman (Robin Schwartz) in attendance—a huge novelty, and, in the end, the biggest innovation at an event devoted to supposedly visionary advancements. The film is full of awkward life, and quite a bit of fun.