{"id":67609,"date":"2014-03-06T16:10:32","date_gmt":"2014-03-06T21:10:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=67609"},"modified":"2019-02-01T12:05:34","modified_gmt":"2019-02-01T17:05:34","slug":"unbelievably-wonderfully-grand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/03\/06\/unbelievably-wonderfully-grand\/","title":{"rendered":"Unbelievably, Wonderfully Grand"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wes Anderson, Stefan Zweig, and their sumptuous surroundings.<\/em><\/p>\n

Looking at this year\u2019s Academy Award nominees for Best Adapted Screenplay,\u00a0Bill Morris at\u00a0The Millions<\/i>\u00a0grumbled<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cHollywood screenwriters need to mix more fiction into their diet.\u201d He can at least give a pass to Wes Anderson, whose new film,\u00a0The Grand Budapest Hotel<\/i>,\u00a0is based not just on one novel but on an entire oeuvre\u2014that of Stefan Zweig, an Austrian writer whose work Anderson has helped revive. In fact, Zweig\u2019s influence on Anderson is so profound that the filmmaker compiled\u00a0The Society of the Crossed Keys<\/i>, a new anthology of Zweig\u2019s work. Unfortunately, the collection is only available in the UK, but its constituents\u2014Zweig\u2019s memoir, the novel\u00a0Beware of Pity<\/i>, and the novella \u201cTwenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman\u201d\u2014can be found separately in the US.<\/p>\n

Both Zweig and Budapest<\/i> find comedy and melancholy in the changing landscape of 1930s Europe, and Anderson is quick to admit his debt to Zweig. The film features two characters meant as stand-ins for the writer\u2014there\u2019s the hotel\u2019s nostalgic, effete concierge, M. Gustave, and the unnamed Author, who appears throughout as a narrator and interlocutor. But Zweig\u2019s influence on Anderson extends far beyond this latest film. Though Anderson says he came across Zweig\u2019s books only six or seven years ago, the pair have long shared similar themes and aesthetics, even if Anderson didn\u2019t know it.<\/p>\n

For starters, consider their fastidious preoccupation with appearance. In an essay examining\u00a0The Royal Tenenbaums<\/i>\u00a0against J.\u2009D. Salinger<\/a>\u2014another of Anderson\u2019s literary influences\u2014Matt Zoller Seitz established a concept called \u201cmaterial synecdoche\u2014showcasing objects, locations, or articles of clothing that define whole personalities, relationships, or conflicts.\u201d Anderson uses his meticulously designed\u00a0mise-en-sc\u00e8ne\u00a0as visual shorthand for his characters. It\u2019s how we understand the Tenenbaums from their wardrobe, their childhood bedrooms, and the way the\u00a0opening scene itemizes the things in those rooms<\/a>. It\u2019s one of Anderson\u2019s favorite storytelling mechanisms\u2014think of Moonrise Kingdom<\/i>, in which Sam Shakusky\u2019s raccoon hat and glasses set him apart from the rest of the Khaki Scouts; think of Max Fischer\u2019s red beret in\u00a0Rushmore<\/i>. In Anderson\u2019s work, the exterior reliably informs the interior. <\/p>\n

Sixty-seven years earlier, Zweig was taking the same tack. Take this character description from his last novella,\u00a0Chess Story<\/i>:<\/p>\n

For the instant he stood up from the chessboard, where he was without peer, Czentovic became an irredeemably grotesque, almost comic figure; despite his solemn black suit, his splendid cravat with its somewhat showy pearl stickpin, and his painstakingly manicured fingernails, his behavior and manners remained those of the simple country boy who had once swept out the parson\u2019s room in the village.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Zweig uses the man\u2019s apparel as a point of entry\u2014every article of Czentovic\u2019s clothing is cataloged, and as the items pile up, we see that they\u2019re larded with an assessment of his character.<\/p>\n

Zweig applies this same material synecdoche to his environments.\u00a0Post-Office Girl<\/i>, the novel that has the most in common with\u00a0The Grand Budapest Hotel<\/i>\u2014it\u2019s set in an extravagant hotel, also during the beginning of World War II\u2014takes a working-class mail girl, Christine, and sweeps her off to a resort in the Swiss Alps. As Christine accustoms herself to the place\u2019s fantastical decadence, Zweig takes a kind of inventory of her hotel room:<\/p>\n

First she cautiously tries out the bed: will it really be all right to sleep there, on that effulgence of cool white? And the flowered silk duvet, spread out like down, light and pillowy to the touch. A push button turns on the lamp, filling every corner with its rosy glow. Discovery upon discovery: the washbasin, white and shiny as a seashell with nickel-plated fixtures, the armchairs, soft and deep and so enveloping that it takes effort to get up again, the polished hardwood of the furniture, harmonizing with the spring-green wallpaper, and here on the table to welcome her a vibrant variegated carnation in a long-stem vase, like a colorful salute from a crystal trumpet. How unbelievably, wonderfully grand!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s Christine\u2019s sense of wonder and naivet\u00e9 to the bourgeois lifestyle that establishes her character. And that\u2019s\u00a0just\u00a0her room\u2014the novel devotes many pages to chronicling the hotel\u2019s extravagance.\u00a0Post-Office Girl<\/i>\u00a0is full of these precise details, itemized in language as lavish and colorful as the things it describes.<\/p>\n

\"photo2\"<\/a>Anderson has a similar fixation on privilege, especially as its seen through the eyes of the less privileged\u2014Max from\u00a0Rushmore<\/i>; Zero, the bellboy who works under M. Gustave in\u00a0The Grand Budapest Hotel<\/i>; and, in some ways, Ned Plimpton in\u00a0The Life Aquatic<\/i>. Such outsiders serve a useful purpose: they allow the audience to share in a material fascination with the worlds Anderson has created.<\/p>\n

Naturally, this mutual obsession with material wealth leaves Anderson and Zweig vulnerable to the same criticisms. At n+1<\/em>, Christian Lorentzen has criticized Anderson\u2019s reliance on\u00a0\u201csets, costumes, characters, and neato conceits\u201d<\/a> over the felicities of plot. On Zweig\u2019s end, Joan Acocella\u2019s introduction to\u00a0Beware of Pity<\/i>\u00a0notes that the author often drew fault when he tended toward \u201cclanking narrative devices\u201d and the \u201cplump, upholstered quality to some of his writing.\u201d And yet, as apposite as they are, these complaints feel small, even if the three brothers in\u00a0The Darjeeling Limited<\/i>\u00a0carry\u00a0literal\u00a0baggage, and quite immaculately designed baggage, at that. When it comes to narrative, Anderson and Zweig prefer to let their lavish, intricate microcosms do the heavy lifting. But this is where they diverge: Anderson\u2019s worlds are imagined; Zweig\u2019s are real, and deeply remembered.<\/p>\n

Perhaps this is why so many Anderson films come with frame stories. Since they\u2019re contained in books or recounted by storytellers at a far remove from the action, the viewer can see that these are worlds Anderson has created, not attempts at realism. And he\u2019s careful to set his films in openly imaginary locations.\u00a0The Grand Budapest Hotel<\/i>\u00a0takes place in the fictitious Republic of Zubrowka;\u00a0Moonrise Kingdom<\/i>\u00a0invented the New England island of New Penzance. The oceans of\u00a0The Life Aquatic<\/i>\u00a0are filled with exotic, imaginary sea life;\u00a0The Royal Tenenbaums<\/i> takes place in an alterna-New York where everything is lettered in Futura. In a\u00a0Wall Street Journal<\/i>\u00a0piece<\/a>, Anderson admitted that he struggled to find a real-life location to film\u00a0The Grand Budapest Hotel<\/i>. He looked at old hotels in Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Poland before discovering the right set in G\u00f6rlitz, Germany. In fact, the building ended up being an unoccupied department store, not a hotel.<\/p>\n

In an interview with Anderson, George Prochnik, the author of a new Zweig biography, connects these location scouting difficulties with a sentiment at the end of Budapest<\/i>, where Zero suggests to the author\/narrator that the world of luxury and grandeur that M. Gustave represents may have disappeared well before the war: \u201cThe possibility is raised that the world M. Gustave inhabits may really have ceased to exist even before he entered it. There is a suggestion that the whole thing is a feat of imagination. I think this resonates with the embrace of illusion in [Zweig\u2019s memoir]\u00a0The World of Yesterday<\/i>.\u201d<\/p>\n

In many ways, Anderson\u2019s films concede the same thing. The worlds he builds are depicted through outlandish rose-colored lenses.\u00a0In his introduction to\u00a0The Wes Anderson Collection<\/i><\/a>, Michael Chabon notes that Anderson\u2019s universe is \u201ca scale model of that mysterious original [world], unbroken, half-remembered.\u201d He also sets his films in liminal spaces: a room at the Grand Budapest or Hotel Chevalier, a sleeper cabin on the Darjeeling Limited, a voyage aboard the\u00a0Belafonte<\/i>. These are transitional places, as if Anderson is acknowledging that their luxury is similarly temporary\u2014or fabricated.<\/p>\n

But if Anderson likes to invent and inhabit bygone worlds, Zweig actually lived in them, and the sense of loss is more acutely felt in his work.\u00a0He wrote the aforementioned memoir, The World of Yesterday<\/i>, while living in exile in Brazil; it\u2019s both a nostalgic portrait of prewar Europe and a lament for its obsolescence. Ten days after turning in the manuscript for the book, Zweig and his wife overdosed on barbiturates in what appeared to be a suicide pact. Zweig longed for the world that had passed him by, one he knew could not return\u2014one he perhaps remembered too fondly.<\/p>\n

Kevin Nguyen<\/i><\/a>\u00a0is a founding editor at The Bygone Bureau, a contributor to Grantland<\/em>, and an editor at Amazon Books.<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wes Anderson, Stefan Zweig, and their sumptuous surroundings. 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