The Open Letter Series is a collection of open letters written to other people, ideas or activities that have taken place over the course of the last few days of uploading in both the public realm and in my personal life. What exactly is an open letter? An open letter is a letter which is often critical in nature that is addressed to a particular person or group of people but intended for publication or to be read by a large group of people. In this case, that is you, the reader.

Each open letter will discuss a different topic, in varying degrees of depth. From politics to personal issues, the Open Letter series aims to provide clarity on issues, create ideas or inspiration, or, in my case, to become a place of stress and thought relief. Nothing is safe from receiving an open letter, not shows or book characters, a class lesson or a provoking idea.

This time, we’ll be focusing The Open Letter Series and base a few on one thing, this time, a movie. Read on and consider the film The Grand Budapest Hotel © 2014. 

The Grand Budapest Hotel.

I talk about this movie a lot for a person who watches at least one a week. It’s my go-to, the name rolls off my tongue, you can’t say grand or Budapest or hotel around me without my brain thinking about that movie.

A few weeks ago, I was talking with some friends about movies. “Watch The Lobster” or “Inglorious Bastards” they would try to convince my one friend who missed out on movies for years of her life. “Watch Grand Budapest” I told her, and all my friends groaned.

There’s always been something about the movie, when I first saw it in 2014, that captivated and enthralled me in ways that never made much sense to me. There’s an allure about it, a kind of curiosity that exists for the sole purpose of you wanting more from it, asking yourself “that’s it?” when you watch it after your first try.

In fact, my first try at watching this movie resulted in me getting bored within the first half hour and I stopped watching it. I closed Netflix and went to bed, leaving the movie alone for about a week until I started to get curious again.

It wasn’t because I had read reviews or people had been telling me “oh, it’s such a great movie” (really, that’s what I tell people now), but it was just this one frame that stuck out in my head for such a long time: the one of M. Gustav sitting in an elevator with Madam D., Zero and the elevator boy (who is nameless throughout the movie), with Tilda Swinton as Madam D. looking absolutely horrified at the idea and knowledge of her own impeding death, with Ralph Fiennes as M. Gustav looking happily at her as he recites to her poetry he made in attempt to soothe her.

She dies anyway, about thirty seconds later, so no spoiler.

With Grand Budapest, I was trying to figure out what type of genre the movie was. I think this plays into – and says a lot about – my need to have everything fit into a narrative or I lose interest. This movie is nothing like any other movie I had ever seen before. It wasn’t funny or action-filled or dramatic or romantic or sexy or anything- it was Grand Budapest-y. T

I could honestly talk about the movie scene by scene, frame by frame, telling you how Wes Anderson used colour not just to convey emotion or associate colour with character (which he didn’t do, not in this one), or how the use of centre-framing his scenes reflects who Wes Anderson is as a person or why the lack of dialogue makes the movie that much more interesting.  

And I will.

If you’ve wasted your time going through the rest of this blog, you might have remembered that I’ve already done an open letter to Wes Anderson once before, but that was more of a rush generalization of everything that Wes has ever done, with specific reference to Grand Budapest as a point of reflection. These next few open letters will be directed to Grand Budapest, talking about frame usage, dialogue, why colour isn’t all it’s mocked up to be, why this movie is a film (and the difference between a movie and a film), and why Grand Budapest is a movie that you have seen over and over again, but never truly watched (and I don’t just mean in the sense that you’ve seen it over and over again the way that I have.) Bear with me throughout the next few weeks as we analyze the hell out of this movie. If you’ve never seen it before, go onto Netflix and plug in “grand Budapest”; it’s the first result with Ralph Fiennes’ face staring happily at you. You’re in for a ride.

Until next week.