Actor Ralpsh Fiennes plays a high class gigilo hotel manager named Gustave in what amounts to a brothel for the elderly wives of the Hungarian and Austrian nobility during the 1930’s.
Falsely accused of poisoning an elderly “client” his quest for justice takes us on an elegant tour of palaces and scheming relatives seeking a vast inheritance.
The journey is narrated by an elderly former bellboy who had joined Fiennes/Gustave on his adventurous quest.
Somewhat a movie comedy with elegance, colorful characters, and aristocratic settings, the degeneracy of the plot is not so apparent. It will by featured in Africa where the decadence of the former European colonialists is applauded as a rationale and justification for the supression of past colonialist influences.
In the end Fiennes/Gustave inherits the estate of the poisoned noblewoman, dies a natural death offscreen, and leaves the declining Grand Budapest Hotel to be managed by his now-grown bellboy in postwar Communist Hungary.
Rating: amusing and farfetched.
