Welcome to the Dollhouse

I was having a conversation with a friend of mine after seeing Wes Anderson's new film, The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), when he mentioned that he found the film's structure to be ungainly. He called it a matryoshka doll, one of those Russian dolls that nest progressively smaller dolls inside themselves. As a literal description of the film's structure, he's right. It's a narrative constructed of flashbacks within flashbacks--needlessly, my friend thought, because only one of the framing narratives has any real connection with the main thrust of the film. I think this is only a marginally useful description of the film. I prefer to think of it as a dollhouse, a comparison that has occurred to me before while watching Anderson's films: In the sequence in Moonlight Kingdom, for instance, when the house becomes a series of panels and the film turns into a kind of comics page. It's also a lot like a dollhouse that's been opened so that you can get to the rooms inside. As in that film, a lot of the humor in The Grand Budapest Hotel is predicated on dressing up its actors in elaborate costumes (no Harvey Keitel in short pants this time, unfortunately--Keitel plays a role more in keeping with his screen persona). I don't really know what it says about Anderson that he sees in film a huge dollhouse where Orson Welles saw a train set. Both directors see a vast toybox in any event.

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