The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson, 2014)

Wes Anderson’s latest, The Grand Budapest Hotel, has bowed to reviews that link the occasionally staggering scale of its production design to the director’s meticulously ordered stop-motion film, The Fantastic Mr. Fox. Certainly the two stand as the most thoroughly crafted works in the oeuvre of a man whose trademark is his fussy attention to detail; in The Grand Budapest Hotel, hotel lobbies, prisons, even Alpine monasteries are created in such lavishly minute precision that the logistics of each impeccably straightened sign, every spotless carpet threaten to divert all attention away from the narrative at hand. In execution, however, the film belongs more with its immediate predecessor, Moonrise Kingdom, as both an unmistakable continuation of its maker’s singular style and an increasingly sophisticated breakdown of it.

From a narrative standpoint, no Wes Anderson film has ever been this convoluted. Typically, the director’s films spend more time merely introducing the characters and their strictly regimented habits than they do detailing what those people get up to. That is not to say that there is not conflict or drive in Anderson’s movies, but that said conflict typically arises from the intrusion of reality and lived, experienced wisdom upon the myopic headspace of stunted wunderkinder, a forceful denial and eventual acceptance of how ignorant these self-perceived geniuses truly are. But The Grand Budapest Hotel is the first of Anderson’s films in which the outside sources of awakening do not come as a natural course of maturation but from the direct imposition of actively hostile forces. Set primarily during WWII, the film presents a series of nested narratives involving characters whose pluck, intelligence and wit is slowly revealed to be utterly inadequate a defense against forces hellbent on eradicating the old way of things. Anderson routinely presents a sense of style and fashion far removed from the present; The Grand Budapest Hotel hones in on the last moment such modes were considered contemporary and proper before being violently stomped out.

Steven Spielberg: Munich

An act of American obliviousness sets in motion the events of Munich. At the 1972 Olympics, a group of American athletes stumble across some Palestinian men attempting to get past a gate. Used to the sight of small bands of men from different countries roaming the area, the Americans jovially call out to them and ask what event they're in. Blind to the tense, apprehensive faces of the men, the athletes show them in and depart on friendly terms. But before the Americans are even out of range, the group is already pulling out new clothes and weapons to storm the hotel room holding the Israeli Olympic team. They do, and everything else plays out on the actual newscasts recorded over the next 18 hours. It ends, of course, with Jim McKay's infamous declaration, "They're all gone."

But despite the film's title, Munich does not end with the conclusion of its heinous massacre; it's only just begun. In fact, Munich may not even be about the aftermath of the killings in the titular city. Released in proximity with the 9/11-conjuring fever dream War of the Worlds, Munich serves as the more thoughtful, severe follow-up to the notion of a terrorist attack and society's response to it. Spielberg's reenactments of news crews frantically assembling outside the hotel, scrambling for any new updates as their presence only worsens the situation, is as indicative of Spielberg's true aims as the final shot showing the New York skyline with the World Trade Center still standing in the middle of the frame. Munich may be about a specific event and the fallout from it, but the director clearly wants us to apply the lessons the movie teaches to more current issues of terrorism and counterterrorism.

Wild Grass

As silly as it is to look for trends in the cinema, sometimes they're just so esoteric that they're too fun not to share. If 2010 has a thread I never expected to see, it's the emergence of a few off-the-wall, brilliant romantic comedies. Rom-coms have become a one-stop shop for the worst of commercial cinema lately, removing the charm and wit that once characterized the genre as one of the most rewarding of mainstream types and turning it into a juggernaut of weak titillation, barren emotion and the most reductive stereotypes in film.

Wild Grass, which premiered to great ballyhoo at last year's Cannes Festival, finally got a U.S. limited release in July of this year before quietly coming to DVD last Tuesday stands with Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy as a romantic comedy that returns to the roots of the genre as a screwball outpouring of the silliest, most ebullient joy the early talkies had to offer. And like Certified Copy, Wild Grass is informed by cinema. Helmed by the 87-year-old Alain Resnais, the film is also but the latest evidence that the cheekiest, freshest and most giddily cinematic films made this year have almost exclusively been made by those above the age of 65 (see also: Kiarostami, Polanski, Scorsese).

The film opens with a zoom-in on an old castle rook overgrown with vegetation before cutting to a piece of cracked asphalt with grass starting to creep through the break. The shot becomes something of a leitmotif throughout the film, with the grass growing ever longer as the narrative progresses. The initial edits are light and springy, with the camera placed low on the vertical axis as it moves through shots until Resnais comes to crowded streets. Rather than the usual shots of endless bored faces, Resnais photographs their feet trotting along en masse. In a move that would have Quentin Tarantino panting in jealousy, Resnais follows a single pair of feet until they reach, naturally, a shoe boutique where an attendant tries out each pump as the camera pulls back enough not to reveal this mystery woman's face. Even when Resnais freezes everything and tracks around her, the actress slowly pivots with the camera, leaving us only with the sight of her frazzled ball of red hair.

That sense of ingenuity powers the film far more than its plot, which could be basically described as follows: on her way out of the store, the woman, Marguerite (Sabine Azéma), a dentist, gets robbed by a thief who skates by and takes her purse. Later that day, George Palat (André Dussollier), a man in his 50s, stumbles across her emptied wallet in the shopping center's parking garage and develops a crush on her ID photo. He proceeds to stalk her until the police get involved, at which point he stops, only for Marguerite to suddenly display a curious interest in Georges.

There it is in essence, but what makes Wild Grass so charming and unexpected is the spin Resnais puts on the material. I am by no means an expert on the director, having seen only Hiroshima Mon Amour, Night and Fog and Last Year at Marienbad, but even those films give an adequate taste of Resnais' style. In Wild Grass, the director displays more visual wit than someone a third his age: as Georges drives his car, tiny thought bubbles appear that show him rehearsing and fantasizing scenarios, turning the casual handover of someone's lost property into the breakthrough into romance, rehearsing his phone call to her in his head as if a teenage boy practicing asking someone to the prom. When he drops the wallet off at a police station, he ends up debating Marguerite's attractiveness with the officer who takes his info (Mathieu Amalric!). The officer scoffs at her ID photo, but Georges pulls out Marguerite's aviation license with a more flattering photo and the cop seems to consider it as if the two were frat buddies debating the hotness of some chick.

Eventually, Georges' behavior grows more erratic. Seemingly content with his home life (and his younger, doting wife), the man cannot keep his thoughts from Marguerite. His inner monologues betray a disturbing propensity for violence with the vague hint that he's done something in the past. When two young women pass him in the parking garage at the start, he jumps to thoughts of strangling them. At the police station, he worries officers will recognize him.

Resnais' camera dances around the action, moving in leaps, swirls, smooth tracking shots and zooms. Occasionally, the direction becomes more frantic, using handheld shots of Georges' family life to show how he feels uncomfortable in what seems the perfect life. When the police come to question him about stalking Marguerite, each question the cops ask, however innocuous, is delivered through quick-zooms on the officers. Resnais then moves to a POV shot looking down as Georges leaps from his chair and shouts at the officer, then he cuts back to show Georges standing at the end of the room. It's not altogether clear if anyone's actually in the room with him at that point, though the sheer distance he got by leaping from his chair is comic in its own right.

Georges' slashing of Marguerite's tires when she does not respond to his letters or phone calls is a twisted act that speaks to inner demons, but Resnais frames that outburst, and all others, as a battle between id and superego without delineation. One can easily differentiate between sanity and madness in something like Fight Club once you learn the steps, but Wild Grass stays elusive. You can never be sure what's motivating Georges from one moment to the next; hell, you can't even be sure whether what we're seeing on the screen is even happening. Georges, not only mourning his father's passing but subconsciously focusing on his own mortality, appears to be suffering from mild memory loss, the kind that doesn't necessarily suggest anything wrong but signals at the very least the transition into old age. Faced with a life that's a bit too calm, he fills the gaps with fanciful ideas of a dangerous past.

Georges finally agrees to back down and settle back with his family, only for Marguerite to start chasing him. If Georges began to fantasize as a way to stave of thoughts of old age and wasted life, Marguerite has reveries simply to escape the doldrums of the present. At work, she's so distracted that she heedlessly causes pain to her patients, and she looks to her refurbished Spitfire with almost fetishistic admiration, even resting her head on its fuselage as if cuddling up with a lover. When her stalker finally backs down, some part of her misses the excitement. She even begins to meet in person with Georges, further confusing an already addled man. Her friend and business partner, Josépha (Emmanuelle Devos), confronts the man at one point, but it is Marguerite who looks hurt by the demand to be left alone. And as Georges came to her apartment, so too does Marguerite come to his home and interact with his family. She even has Josépha seduce Georges while she speaks with the wife, only for Georges to return and try and cast her out. He is unsuccessful.

"Everything is excusable," Georges says in one of his early reveries before amending himself. "Not everything, not bad taste." Wild Grass exists in its own world where the most gaudy and self-apparent camera movements create the story rather than hang off a narrative as adornment. The camera turns a pointless rom-com into an open-ended feature that blurs genre lines. Accompanied by the riotously ominous music by Mark Snow (of X-Files fame), Resnais' camera adds the suspense of a paranoid thriller, and no joke in the film is as funny as the constant deflation of this false unease. At the break between Georges pursuing Marguerite and her chasing him, Georges goes to a midnight showing the old war film The Bridges of Toko-Ri, and the split in the film is offset by the epic 20th Century Fox theme. Resnais uses it again for a false ending, already subverting the usage of the theme as something that announces the start of a film in order to end one, then throwing all that away and moving into the real ending, which is even more baffling.

Wild Grass may be nothing more than an 87-year-old's attempt to prove he's still got some charm. But he succeeds brilliantly, so who am I to knock the film? This is not shaping up to be a year in which cinema uncovers the truths of where we are as a society. Then again, in so political a year as this, it's nice to be spared, for the most part, the usual preaching. That 2010 is instead destined to be a year in which some of the more intriguing stylistic exercises in some time have been released domestically offers some measurable comfort in the face of overwhelming mediocrity offered up at the multiplex. With its screwball wit and its artistic sophistication, Wild Grass is as fundamentally dispensable yet incessantly fun as all the action blockbusters this year failed to be.

A Christmas Tale

Nothing in A Christmas Tale is so bold and funny as its title, a decidedly bland arrangement of two words and an indefinite article that suggests that this is a Christmas movie comme les autres. Any such notion gets chucked out of the window in the first half-hour of this dreamy 151-minute family drama, and while it may look like your average family troubles melodrama on paper, nothing about Arnaud Desplechin could ever make an average movie.

In fact, if I look to some prior reference as a base of comparison, I would have to bypass all the saccharine holiday flicks and go straight to two clear antecedents: Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums and Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander. Fanny and Alexander exerted at least an indirect influence on Desplechin's prior Kings and Queen, what with its usage of ghosts to flesh out a family crisis and existential doubt, but the entire structure of Bergman's most personal opus informs A Christmas Tale, albeit tinged heavily with Anderson's deadpan sense of the dysfunctional elite.

As with the characters in both Anderson and Bergman's films, the Vuillard family is wealthy (though not nearly to the extent of the Tenenbaums or the Ekdahls), highly-educated and aloof. Desplechin opens with a shadow puppet play recounting the family's history, of a couple, Abel (Jean-Paul Roussillon) and Junon (Catherine Deneuve, in one of her finest roles), who had a son and a daughter. The boy, Joseph, developed a rare disorder, contracted leukemia and died, leaving behind his sister, Elizabeth, as the eldest child to two younger brothers, Henri and Ivan.

We then see the two dominant members of the family in the flesh separately: Junon, who collapses in her home, and Elizabeth, who expresses her inchoate rage and misery to her husband. Desplechin flashes back six years to gather all the family in one place: a courtroom. The middle child, Henri (Mathieu Amalric, proving once again that no one can play a drunken sophisticate quite like him), has gone bankrupt, and Elizabeth (Anne Consigny, who co-starred with Amalric in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) agrees to help bail him out, on the condition that he never contact her again. We don't know why she hates him so, but a desperate Henri agrees, only to find himself shunned by the rest of the family.

Six years later, whatever animosity exists between the two siblings is but one thread in the tapestry of dysfunction: to regale you with but a fraction of feuds, secrets and pettiness besetting the Vuillard family would waste words and would have no effect on those who have not seen the film, as a mere list of names and grievances carries with it no impact. It would also place in your minds a pre-conception of the nature of the film, likely leading to a conclusion that A Christmas Tale is a film of family hijinks and loud yelling and terribly pedestrian comedy as we Americans have come to expect from holiday entertainment. But Desplechin wrings laughs from the darker moments and gives severity and depth to the lighter ones.

It's important, however, to know that Junon collapsed at the start because she suffers from the same blood disease that took her first son's life. She's a practical realist who knows how slim the odds are, yet she clearly feels something under her resignation, as she invites the entire family for Christmas, something she clearly hasn't done since they splintered six years ago. But does she invite them because she wants to see her family back together or if she just wants to comb her progeny for a possible match for her rare blood phenotype in order to receive a marrow transplant. All signs point to the latter, as everyone shows up to Abel and Junon's house with blood test results.

Desplechin loves to point out the artifice of his films: A Christmas Tale opens with that puppet show, it employs irises to highlight action and introduce characters, inserts titled chapters and features numerous scenes of characters speaking directly to the camera. There is even a moment of Henri reading a critical letter he sent to his sister that openly recalls the note left by the dead father in Kings and Queen. Yet the self-reflexivity has the opposite effect of the Brechtian alienation effect Godard so dearly loved, drawing us in closer with its trickery. The soliloquies to the camera have the effect of generating intimacy, as if they are confiding in us, yet these scenes do not stick out as theatrical because these characters are so brutally honest with each other.

Take one of the best scenes of the film, in which Henri and Junon smoke out in the snow-covered backyard. They flatly describe how they don't love each other, discussing their distaste without boring us with a list of past moments that would have no connection to the audience. Yet there is affection in their voices, as if they've become so used to sniping each other that a true love exists under their harshness. Junon later takes Henri's girlfriend, Faunia (Emmanuelle Devos, playing a wry, schadenfreude-prone version of Erland Josephson's Jewish observer Isak in Fanny) shopping and mentions that she hates Ivan's wife Sylvia (Chiara Mastroianni, Deneuve's actual daughter) for taking away the child she loves and expresses approval for Faunia for taking the one she doesn't.

That sort of straight-faced contempt fuels much of the film's dark humor; Henri shows Faunia photos of his dead wife, who died in a car accident, and his girlfriend responds, "She was pretty." "Lousy driver," Henri responds, without missing a beat. Desplechin never plays up the penchant for any one of its tangled plots to lead into cloying self-pity and cheap emotional manipulation, admitting that, yes, sometimes families suck, but you've just got to laugh and keep on living.

Like Kings and Queen, A Christmas Tale is lengthy, but it never loses momentum. Desplechin structures a largely plotless airing of grievances with precision: he presents the psychological issues of Elizabeth's troubled son Paul almost like the trailer for a thriller, with quick fades to black punctuated by bursts of action. His hand-held shots are at times distinguishable from more formal shooting only by the extremity of their angles. He does not have his colleague Assayas' smoothness with the camera, but Desplechin somehow gives verisimilitude to his arty technique. Like Scorsese, he's so adept at combining style with substance that his most self-indulgent moments are inseparable from the content of the film.

I found myself moved by the ending, which is weird because I'm not entirely sure what the hell happened. Like the rest of A Christmas Tale, it's both dark and warm-hearted, not given to easy explanations and capable of finding humor, pathos and redemption in anything. Perhaps the key to unlocking the film lies near its midpoint, as Elizabeth receives a golden heart charm from a family friend, and Desplechin zooms in on it as the screen fades to a shot of the Vuillard home's exterior. It may be somewhat hollow and coated in materialistic sheen, but this family has a heart, and without it Desplechin couldn't have made one of the most strikingly original entries into one of the most overplayed genres in film.

Kings and Queen

Charting the various literary sources, mythologies, psychological studies and cinematic antecedents that inform Arnaud Desplechin's Kings and Queen is a fool's errand, more useful in establishing the critic's own range of knowledge than linking all the influences to some narrative importance (read: I am mocking people who are smarter and more well-read than myself, which is a hell of a broad swipe). Taken as a whole, however, these influences reveal the broad size of the film's canvas, Desplechin capturing these little winks (and occasionally vital building blocks) with the same loving detail with which he photographs the mad characters of this melodrama.

Wait, let me back up. Kings and Queen cannot be so easily shoehorned into a single genre, and certainly not into a single cinematic style. At the start of the film, Nora (Emmanuelle Devos), a gorgeous woman who walked out of Botticelli painting and somehow set herself up as a French bourgeoise, speaks in an interview that can only be for the audience. She presents herself as contented and blessed; she's twice-divorced but has found someone she feels is "Mr. Right." This semi-diegetic segment only reveals her capacity for self-deception, however, as her life begins to crumble as soon as the narrative properly begins.

We discover that her first husband, Pierre, impregnated her and committed suicide. Perhaps out of guilt and grief, she rarely sees the son, 10-year-old Elias, that resulted from the relationship. Her second husband, Ismaël, was unfaithful and caused her to leave. Her third, Jean-Jacques, is emotionally and physically distant but rich, which seems to be all Nora really wants from a man at the moment. As we will eventually discover, none of the three is or was ever truly her husband, and all are incompatible with Nora in some way.

The only man she ever loved without reservation is her father, Louis (Maurice Garrel), who complains of stomach pains and heads to the doctor. They operate for an ulcer but instead find cancer, and the doctors tell Nora that his days are numbered. Desplechin juxtaposes her unbridled grief over the news and the continuing trials of her father's pain with the breakdowns of her other relationships; with the latter, she maintains a regal, queenly poise throughout, emotional but collected. With the former, she can barely keep up her façade, her emotional wall breaking at inappropriate times.

The drama of Nora's story is contrasted with Desplechin's look at the current predicament of Nora's second beau, Ismaël (Mathieu Amalric). A brilliant violist, Ismaël owes 700,000 francs to the French IRS and is stirred from blast hip-hop in his apartment by two hospital staffers (whom he dubs Prospero and Caliban) who've come to take him to a mental ward. This scene is both wildly comedic and humanizing, as Desplechin and Amalric temper the abrasiveness of Ismaël's refusal to go along with the staffers with a quick look inside his apartment at a noose and Amalric's deflated delivery of "I just need to know that I can do it."

Whereas Nora hides her foibles behind her stoic mask, Ismaël is a torrent of madness. In a conversation with the hospital psychiatrist (Catherine Deneuve), he launches into a misogynistic tirade about how women have "no souls." In one riotous scene -- set to hysterically jaunty jazz music, no less -- Ismaël raids the hospital pharmacy to hook his lawyer up with some meds. Amalric finds the perfect note for the character, indulging in such farcical activities while presenting Ismaël's madness with a believable humanity. While committed in the hospital, he meets Arielle, an attractive young lady in the hospital for yet another suicide attempt, and the two find comfort in each other's madness.

With these disparate stories, Desplechin crafts a world as richly layered as an Altman or early Paul Thomas Anderson work, jumping across perspectives to chart the mad, mad world we've all made for ourselves. Yet where Altman roamed his characters' lives with a decidedly ironic view, Desplechin succeeds in adding a believable emotional core where Anderson's Magnolia attempted the same but fell into OTT melodrama. Devos plays Nora as a Hitchcockian ice-queen (it's no coincidence that Catherine Deneuve's character instantly takes Nora in when she comes to the office) undergoing a Bergmanesque crisis of personal faith. She's sympathetic even though she drove one lover to suicide, neglects her son and worries more about her image than her mental state. When she at last breaks down completely, Louis' home nurse acts as our stand-in as she attempts to comfort Nora, who simply waves her (and us) away, unable to bear the thought of someone seeing her emotionally naked. Amalric, on the other hand, can place all of Ismaël's swirling emotions on display -- raging at the world in eloquent, well-read tirades, spontaneously breakdancing, detailing erotic dreams with his anti-Freudian therapist (whose very name strikes fear into the hearts of the hospital staff) -- and if anything we can sympathize with his arrogant madness more because he's venting his sins as Nora internalizes hers.

With these two characters serving as checkpoints, Desplechin uses Kings and Queen to examine what defines us, perhaps not as humans but at least in terms of social perception. Arielle is a white Frenchwoman, but people refer to her as "La chinoise" (the Chinese girl) because she's studying sinology, a sobriquet not used for the pharmacy's Asian clerk. A recurring motif of the story involves the idea of adoption: Nora, desperate to find a father figure for Elias (and perhaps someone to do the child-rearing for her), asks Ismaël to adopt him as the boy always liked Ismaël best. Desplechin subverts our expectations of the difference between biological relation and adoption, though, with an extraneous but vital scene. Ismaël visits his Alzheimer's-stricken grandmother, who recognizes her grandson but cannot remember if he's related by blood or adoption. His mother says that she gave birth to Ismaël, and the grandmother is happy. But when Ismaël's father, whom the grandmother also recognizes, reminds her that she adopted him, without batting an eyelash she responds, "Well, that's good too." Near the end, Ismaël declares his love for Arielle while wearing a Musketeer cape, and suddenly his expression of madness becomes a symbol of the noble heart beneath his rough exterior. Desplechin doesn't care so much about the labels we assign ourselves or are assigned to us but what they might mean to the people they label. In his world, people don't abandon labels but create them through their actions and passions and not through skin color or lineage.

An exception, though, is gender. When Nora gave birth to Elias, she could not place Pierre's name on the child's birth certificate because the couple were unwed and he died without leaving any indication that he would recognize the child as his own. Obviously, the female cannot deny the child that comes from her wound, and the stress of wondering if her child will be "accepted" perhaps informs her ongoing struggle to assign him an documented father figure. Elias, Pierre, Ismaël and Louis make up the titular Kings of the story, and all have an emotional freedom not afforded to the Queen, who must keep her poise even as her world crumbles around her.

For all of these profound statements, however, Desplechin has a touch of the trickster about him, and Kings and Queen teems with moments that play with our usual expectations. His shots of Nora tend to be hand-held and erratic compared to her cool exterior where the explosive Ismaël's shots are more refined, the camera mounted on a stand or a crane. When Arielle describes her suicide attempt to Ismaël, Desplechin inserts a brief shot of her making a crude, joking face that may or may not be real but is an insight to her inner turmoil nonetheless. Returning the Bergman connection I made earlier, Kings and Queen features appearances from ghosts that recalls the master's Fanny and Alexander. Two ghosts feature in Nora's story: the first, her lover Pierre's, is forgiving and mature in death where he wasn't in life.

The second apparition offers the film's most powerful sequence; Louis' disease finally takes its toll, and Nora cleans out his residence after the funeral. Nora finds a letter addressed to her in his unfinished manuscript, but instead of playing the usual, trite voiceover, Desplechin cuts to a vision of the father sitting in a room so spare it's unsettling. He recites the contents of the letter directly to the camera, damning his daughter's hypocrisy and vanity with such stunning force that even Garrel's barely emotive, even somewhat wistful delivery is as scathing as the loudest screams. Around the same time, Ismaël, rehabilitated and released, must field a similar attack from the lead violin in his quartet. Both characters richly deserve the tongue-lashings they receive, but we take no pleasure from these diatribes, nor does Desplechin intend or want us to do so.

Kings and Queen opens with a retelling the story of Leda, a Greek woman seduced by Zeus in the form of a swan. Nora buys a painting depicting the story for her father, a Greek professor, a symbol of her Electra complex hilariously suggested by Louis' publisher as the cover for the book that will eventually contain Louis' scalding letter. This joke is so layered into the story that I didn't even catch until I went and watched this a second time, which I did almost immediately after watching it the first. There's also a broadly comedic moment just after that devastating monologue by the dead father, in which Ismaël reconnects with his own father, Abel (Jean-Paul Roussillon), just as some youths attempt to rob the tough old man's grocery. The resulting failed robbery is brilliant in its dark humor, and only funnier when you place it in the context of what came before it.

That warped mélange of comedy, drama, formalist technique and New Wave unpredictability results in one of the most rewarding films I've seen of the last few years, almost as complete in its world creation and critique as Edward Yang's Yi Yi. He extracts the best from his actors, and together they chart character evolutions so masterfully paced that you don't realize someone has changed until something wholly unlike that character is revealed. Ismaël, initially a childish, narcissistic bundle of nerves, is allowed the film's most bare moment of wisdom at the end, as he imparts advice upon young Elias. "You need an extra adult to help you grow,: he says, "so you're not shut up in the love between parents...and children." With his beautiful, protracted speech, he breaks the child free of the trap that ensnared the boy's mother and grandfather, and we look to Elias' future with hope. How wonderful it is that we do the same with the adults, too.