The Grand Budapest Hotel: Wes Anderson's Style (Review)

Wes Anderson's style in The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) is influenced by German expressionism. Anderson uses the color, the composition, the acting  and the camera movement to express the emotions and the ideas. The color sometimes signifies the historical background and the cultural atmosphere of the scenes. The composition put the characters and the objects in the frames that express their relations to the characters' subjectivity and the world's objectivity. Anderson's dialogues are funny, narrative oriented and well structured. His popular thematic elements such as family problems and father-son/daughter relationships can be also found in the film.


The influence of German expressionism is recognizable and  clear from the beginning of the film. The hotel setting is gloomy, dark and desolated. Zero Moustafa is a mysterious character, and we don't know anything about his past. His story is told in flash back. His room in the hotel is small that gives the audience a sense of claustrophobia and entrapment. In the flashback, the violet color of the  uniforms of the Hotel workers may represent the vitality and the liveliness of European cultural period after First World War. Red and pink color of the building and its interior decoration have associations with the sense of life that exist into the Hotel and its environment. At the same time, the cleanliness and the order of the setting in Hotel reminds us how M. Gustave is in control of everything. Andersons' characters are not psychologically complicated creatures in the film, but his villains can be interpreted as the parody of German expressionist monsters such as Vampire and Golem in Jopling's(Daniel Defoe) appearance and behaviour.  Dimitri(Adrian Brody) is also ruthless and psychopath. His character like any other German expressionistic villains is frightening and scary, but his weakness in controlling the situation and overcoming Gustave's intelligence effeminates him and takes out of him all of the forces of his masculinity. The father-son relationship between Moustafa and Gustave is counterbalanced with the relationship between Dimitri and his mother. Review: By Morad Sadeghi