Wednesday, April 2, 2014

GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL FILM REVIEW AND WINE PAIRING

Wes Anderson has created a masterpiece in his latest work, The Grand Budapest Hotel.  This film reaches into your heart and fills you with all the smiles and grins of a child's first puppet show.   It is a movie to go and view to escape - to truly immerse yourself in another world full of smiles, deviance, drama, laughter, and ridiculousness, all, set into a landscape of depth and color that warms the soul.

The cast of the Grand Budapest is a line-up like no other.  Usually, I fear such works where too many great actors are piled into one house as they seem to either drown each other out or bleed from the capacity that makes each of them so unique and great on their own.  Not in this film.  The casting is perfect and, surprisingly, some of the major players (of which there are many) only have small parts which really builds into the piecemeal menagerie that Anderson creates in his cookie-cutter approach to his brilliant set.  Adrien Brody and William Dafoe were my two favorites - you choose yours.....it is so friggin awesome!

What really impressed me the most in this production was the color schemes of the set.  The mauves, the pinks, the purples, the violets, and the light blues and yellows.  So much mood was laid into the set that it could genuinely make you feel a specific mood or emotion with each different scene.  With this, the hilarious parts and the dramatic events and even the episodes that may lead one to bite a fingernail or two were bound by color schemes that either fit or did not, depending on what, exactly, was transpiring in the story.  As a patron, you were left laughing, reeling, shaken, horrified, or simply smiling at something that reminded you of your own childhood as the dreamy colors sped past your eyes.

To pair a wine that is so colorful and full of smiles that it fits this movie, one must look to color and fruit and depth to find confluence with this great film.  As two very important characters sip brut over an important discussion in the hotel(no spoiler alert, here, sorry), I find so very fitting, to pair this film with the Brut Rose' from Canard-Duchene.  Champagne is such a classy libation that it only seems appropriate.  This, and its gorgeous rose and light cherry and strawberry fruit encapsulated in a pink foliage label that much resembles the color schemes of one of the sets of The Grand Budapest Hotel as they are stacked and folded high for our viewing pleasure.....you will see what i mean - enjoy!