Friday is here, again, and this weekend we’ll have some time to dedicate to our favorite hobby: watch a movie. If you run out of ideas don’t worry, you won’t waste time because we have already chosen The Grand Budapest Hotel, a movie that everyone has seen once in their life, but two are always better than one.
It’s certainly Wes Anderson‘s most intricate and interesting film and most likely also the director’s aesthetic and narrative masterpiece. It won nine nominations at the Oscars in 2015, triumphing in the categories “Best Costume”, “Best Set Design“, “Best Makeup” and “Best Soundtrack”; at the Globe, instead, the film won as “Best Comedy or Music”.
(Still undecided whether to watch it?)
The story is certainly as bizarre as the characters in it, sometimes so intricate that it seems impossible to get out of it, yet there’s nothing impossible inside that mysterious hotel because everything is suspended in a surreal, earthly world.
Wes, with the director of photography Robert Yeoman, creates every single scene taking into account the most imperceptible details in order to produce perfect images even in the pause; the color choices are his strong point, all the films have a palette of reference so as to conquer memorability among the memories of anyone who has already seen them.
Colors play an important role since they determine two types of scenes: for the harmonious and calm ones the selection of soft and pastel colors prevails, while the pressing and alienating ones they appear under strong color combinations. Needless to say that photography represents the key element in the cinematographic realization and needless to say that in this Wes is its master.
There is no doubt: his aesthetic and artistic imagination is unique, but there are those who, letting themselves be inspired, have built their photographic work on a chromatic choice and framing at the limits of precision. This is the case of Teresa Freitas, a young Portuguese photographer who, through her shots, shows us common scenes with meticulous attention to the elements that build them, proposing something that perhaps we have already seen but never through this perspective.
Did you know: for the outdoor shots of the hotel Wes used a 3-meter-high scale model, made entirely by hand because if this had been done on the computer, in the director’s idea, it would have appeared to the audience too offset from reality.
Film: Comedy
Director: Wes Anderson
Writers: Stefan Zweig (inspired by the writings of), Wes Anderson (screenplay)
Stars: Ralph Fiennes, F. Murray Abraham, Mathieu Amalric
