It’s funny, when I first saw the movie, I really enjoyed it, but in the 10+ yrs since its release, I feel that it’s become even more important. I gotta hand it to Wes Anderson, even though it’s a late Obama era film, it reaches back to the rising fascism of the 30’s and 40’s to feel more relevant than ever.
Obviously it’s hardly a “perfect” piece of antifascist art. There’s plenty of liberal self-soothing. However, I think there’s three scenes that lock the fuck in to create a really lovely piece of work.
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The first scene where they cross the border and Zero is about to be killed by a fascist death squad, and Edward Norton shows up to stop it. This is, in many ways, the “liberal” perspective - that fascists are just individuals who are part of a bad thing, and we can reform them individually. And the film does make it look like it “works” because Edward Norton’s character is fundamentally also a liberal like M. Gustave. We are led to, briefly, believe that somehow liberalism can overcome fascism through “humanity” - whatever that is.
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We then get the scene in the middle where Gustave berates Zero for being an “immigrant.” This, I think, is really smart by Anderson. He shows a well-intentioned liberal so up his own ass he drops the mask of humanity. In a way, this upholds The Deserter thought - the mask has to slip to do the deed. We see the underlying potential for any subject of this world to become a fascist - even a “good” man like Gustave. The realization/regret here is also really great. Obviously this is because fundamentally Gustave still sees Zero as a human and thus can “hear” him when he replies, but needless to say, kudos to Anderson for really showing the underlying potential that anyone in a fascist regime, without proper consciousness, can become a fascist themselves.
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The final scene on the train is sublime. I’ll spoiler it in case you’ve never seen it.
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The change here is absolutely great. Obviously all the filmmaking -the black and white, etc. - pays off here in spades. The way that Gustave tries to use liberalism to save Zero again is touching, and his turn to his wealth/status as well - all of this futile in the face of a death machine - it’s exceptionally powerful. His final “you filthy god damn pockmarked fascist assholes” before the cut and the final “in the end they shot him” is perhaps even more relevant at our current moment than it was when it was written/filmed. The fact that Gustave dies for his antifascist principles I think really emphasizes that no amount of institutional liberal power matters. And yet, that kind of action/sacrifice still matters and is something to be celebrated. It’s touching, and I really cry every time it hits (even just pulling up the scene to get the quote right had me starting to feel things).
Obviously there’s all the pleasures of a Wes Anderson film. It isn’t the deepest well. But, especially since the world is so dark right now, a film that doesn’t shy away from the darkness even as it gives us a pleasant illusion of “civilization” can be really enjoyable.
Watch it if you haven’t! I’ll be re-watching tonight.
Well, it is partially dealing with the rise in fascism, but overall it is more broadly about Eastern Europe in the interwar period, particularly how it was dealing with the breakup of these large multi-cultural empires (Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman). That is why it is dedicated Stefan Zweig with both “The Author” and Gustav being somewhat stand-ins for him and his views. Stefan Zweig was an Austrian Jew in the Vienna Circle. He was a member of this fairly multicultural and dynamic intelligentsia in Austria-Hungary. And felt that there was something real that was lost when it was broken up into nation-states. Though it is often not even expressed in a form of Liberalism, but a backwards looking obsession with the cultured and cosmopolitan nature of the aristocracy and trying to maintain the facade of the past in still keeping The Grand Budapest going and being “a faint glimmer of civilization”.
That is why Zero is a refugee. He is one of the many people to fall victim to this process of carving these empires into nation-states. This is later associated with fascism, but where the precedents of fascism are already found in 19th century liberalism and nationalism. These nation-states involved a lot of ethnic cleansing and removal of minorities, probably the best example is Turkey with the Armenian Genocide and its mass population transfers with Greece. This created a lot of stateless people and refugees, as if your ethnic group was too small to get its own nation-state and the country you now live in doesn’t want you, you were made stateless overnight. Zero is supposed to be one of these stateless refugees, probably from the former Ottoman empire.
And how this world is very cosmopolitan and used to be integrated is found in all these little details. Like it is heavily implied by the signs and a few lines like “Abfahren” that everyone in the Grand Budapest is supposed to be speaking German, but all of the titles are French (Monsieur Gustav) and a lot of the place names and first names are Slavic (Dmitri, though his family’s name and aristocratic titles are German). All the run ins with the soldiers and fascists are having to cross this nearby border to Lutz, and by the costuming, Ed Norton’s character is supposed to be Austrian police or pre-fascist soldiers.
The rise in fascism is presented more as a further tragedy and an intensification of this nationalism along with an outcome of this decline. Dmitri being an SS officer isn’t just further underscoring that the movie’s villain is a bad guy. But an angry son of a declining aristocratic family was a prime constituency of European fascism.
the finale is a great statement of purpose from Wes – Gustave’s fastidious attention to style and rules, reflecting Wes’s own, counterposed against the boorish cruelty of the fascists; a rebuke of the smoothbrain criticism which reduce him to merely engaging in superficial formalism or twee aesthetics – form is content, style substance, the love that Wes injects into every shot and composition emblematic of a deep appreciation of the World and experience and against indifference (and how true this is – how the fascists love soulless slop, and AI, and hate art and culture).
there’s a lot of hay made out of what can be considered great conservative art ( if there’s truth or beauty in a work which is elides or rejects otherwise correct moral positions)-- never mentioned is that Wes is a great Burkean artist.
