videobudapest_amf23

- So what else is new? - Shall we move to the Grand Budapest Hotel. - It's about time. –It is about time. Which is the new film by Wes Anderson. Wes Anderson’s films on some level they're kind of impenetrable because they're so sort of tightly wound, they're so sort of precise it’s all to do with boxes within boxes it’s stories about storytelling. Whenever you see a Wes Anderson film you know within five seconds that you’re watching Wes Anderson, even if it’s live action it looks like it’s animated, every physical move, every facial gesture is really really precise. You often have storytellers telling stories about stories, you have books as a sort of narrative device, you have chapter headings, you have changing frame sizes, you have doll's house… Everything about them it sort of screams artifice and screams construction. So the story here we begin with an author played by Tom Wilkinson who then throws the story about a younger version of himself played by Jude Law, who then hands the story over to F. Murray Abraham as Mr. Mustafa who is the sort of the figure behind the hotel Budapest. who then throws the story further back to his younger self, 'zero', who is learning his trade in the nineteen thirties in this extraordinary building looks like a great big cake a sort of huge sort of confection of a building, in which the central... every life revolves around Mr. Gustav who is the concierge brilliantly played, it has to be said, by Ralph Fiennes in his finest. People don't often think about Ralph Fiennes as being a comic actor, you know they think in the serious stuff he’s done, in fine form as Mr. Gustav here he is explaining to 'zero' the young Mr. Mustafa, whom remember we’ve got back to him. live in the hotel as a bellboy.