Summary
We see the hotel lit up at night. A title card reads “Madame C.V.D.u.T.” Zero carries newspapers through a square, and his eyes widen as he reads a headline. He runs to the funicular and rides it up the mountain and into the hotel. He goes to a hotel room where Gustave is in the middle of an affair with a guest, and knocks. When Gustave answers and asks what he wants, Zero shows him the headline that caught his attention: “Dowager Countess Found Dead in Boudoir” along with a picture of the old woman to whom Gustave lovingly bid farewell at the start of the film. “We must go to her,” Gustave says, and instructs Zero to go pack for the journey.
Zero and Gustave take a train to Lutz. Gustave is sad that he didn’t listen to the countess’s premonition earlier. “All of Lutz will be dressed in black, except her own ghastly deceitful children whom she loathed and couldn’t bear to kiss hello,” he tells Zero. Gustave then wonders if the countess left him any money, and clarifies to Zero, “She was dynamite in the sack, by the way.” Suddenly the train stops, and as Gustave and Zero look out the window, they see a number of military men outside. A title reads, “October 19, Closing of the Frontier.” The door of their car opens and a military man demands to see their documents. “It’s not a very flattering portrait I’m afraid, I was once considered a great beauty,” Gustave says as he hands the corporal his documents.
The corporal examines Zero’s documents and asks him to come into the hall. Gustave comes immediately to Zero’s defense, alleging that he has had Zero’s papers approved and saying, “You can’t arrest just because he’s a bloody immigrant. He hasn’t done anything wrong.” The military men try and take Zero away, but Gustave tries to prevent them, yelling, “Take your hands off my lobby boy!” An inspector named Henckels blows a whistle and comes down the hall to see what’s going on. Henckels recognizes Gustave from childhood and introduces himself, before ordering the military men to release Gustave and Zero. Noting that Zero is “stateless” Henckels hands Zero a temporary card letting him travel “free and unmolested.”
We see a taxi speeding down a snowy street and arriving at the estate of the countess. When they come in the front door, Gustave asks Clotilde, a maid, to take him to the countess. She leads Gustave and Zero through a giant mansion and into a large hall where the countess is in a coffin. Gustave is delighted to see that the countess looks wonderful and says to her body, “I don’t know what kind of cream they’ve put on you down at the morgue, but I want some.” Before fetching Gustave some water, Clotilde informs Gustave that Monsieur Serge wants to see Gustave in his office. Gustave and Serge are brought into a butler’s pantry, when suddenly a servant enters wearing a panicked expression.
Moustafa narrates, “When the destiny of a great fortune is at stake, men's greed spreads like a poison in the bloodstream. Uncles, nephews, cousins, in-laws of increasingly tenuous connection. The old woman's distant relations had come foraging out of the woodwork.” Gustave and Zero go into a large hall, where dozens of relatives are sitting, hoping to get a piece of the woman’s fortune. The executor presiding over the acquisition of the countess’ estate is Deputy Kovacs, the emissary for the hotel. Kovacs takes his place at the front of the room and begins to go through her will, as well as all of her amendments to the will over the years. Kovacs announces that the bulk of her estate is being handed over to her son Dmitri (a diabolical mustachioed man drinking a whiskey), along with his three sisters. The hall erupts into murmurs, as Kovacs adds that he has recently received an amendment from “Madame D” herself that he will read now.
Kovacs reads the letter, which gives possession of a special painting, called Boy with Apple by Johannes van Hoytl. The room erupts in scandal at the news, and Gustave presents himself to the room. Rising from his chair, Dmitri calls Gustave out for being a concierge and tells the group that Gustave is an “intruder.” “You’re not getting Boy with Apple you goddamn little fruit,” snarls Dmitri. When he accuses Gustave of preying on his mother and sleeping with old ladies, Gustave confirms, “I go to bed with all my friends.” At this, Dmitri punches him squarely in the face. Another man punches Zero, as the people assembled gasp. Dmitri threatens Gustave that he will kill him if he ever finds out he slept with the countess. “I thought I was supposed to be a fucking faggot,” Gustave says, and Dmitri snarls, “You are, but you’re bisexual.”
A servant brings Gustave and Zero into the butler’s pantry, where Gustave tells Zero that the painting he inherited is priceless and Dmitri and his siblings will likely fight him for it. Zero requests to see the painting and they rush to go find it. They hurry down a hall surreptitiously in search of the painting. They eventually find it, hanging above the mantle. Gustave tells Zero, “This is van Hoytl's exquisite portrayal of a beautiful boy on the cusp of manhood: blonde, smooth, skin as white as that milk, of impeccable provenance, one of the last in private hands, and, unquestionably, the best. It's a masterpiece. The rest of this shit is worthless junk.” Gustave and Zero look at one another, then Zero goes and get a stool to climb up, and they steal the painting together, replacing it with an Egon Schiele painting that is sitting nearby. The two of them run into Serge and Clotilde in the lobby, and Gustave asks Serge to wrap up the painting, which he does. As Gustave and Zero climb into a cab, Gustave asks Serge what he wanted to tell him before, but Serge says he cannot say at the moment. “Write me tomorrow,” says Gustave, and they drive away.
Gustave and Zero ride the train. Having hung up the painting in the car, Gustave admires it, saying, “It reminded her of me, it will remind me of her, always. I’ll die with this picture above my bed.” When Gustave and Zero get into bed, Gustave has a change of heart and says that they should sell the painting in case the countess’s children try to steal it back. He climbs up to Zero’s bunk and wants to make a blood pact that they will “contact the black market and liquidate Boy with Apple by the end of the week, then leave the country and lay low, somewhere along the Maltese Riviera until the troubles blow over and we resume our posts.” He offers Zero 1.5 percent of the money earned from the painting, but Zero wants more. Gustave doesn’t budge, but tells Zero that he will be his sole heir when he dies.
The next day, Gustave and Zero put the painting in a safe at the Grand Budapest. They are interrupted by a hotel worker who tells Gustave that the police are there looking for him. “Tell them I’ll be right down,” says Gustave. Gustave coaches Zero not to say anything about the painting and to feign complete ignorance, and the two of them go down to meet with the police.
Analysis
The film often disrupts the viewer’s expectation by abruptly revealing a new piece of information, often to comic effect. This is especially true of the moment when Zero runs to show Gustave the newspaper headline. While the most prominent headline is about the fact that there is a war starting, and the viewer initially thinks this is what Zero is alarmed about, the camera quickly zooms in after a moment on the actual headline in question, revealing that the dowager countess with whom Gustave was having an affair is now dead. This sudden shift is a way for the movie to poke fun at its own lightness of tone, to suggest that the movie itself is concerned less with issues of national security than it is with style and playfulness.
Gustave is, first and foremost, an aesthete, a dandy concerned with the finer things in life. This often comes to light in comically inopportune moments. For instance, when they are interrupted in their train car by members of the military, Gustave takes a glib and effete attitude towards the stoic colonel, calling him “darling” and speaking to him as though he were a dowager countess himself. This gender-bent performance is often comical in its contrast to the cold and harsh world surrounding Gustave. Later, when he arrives at the countess’s coffin, Gustave is impressed with how good she looks, and speaks to the countess’ body about her embalmer’s excellent skin care regimen. Rather than mourn her death, Gustave wants her face cream. It is this aesthetic detachment from the world, matched with his Byronic deep feeling and appreciation for the more romantic elements of life, that make Gustave such an unusual man. His heroism lies precisely in the fact that he is a fashionable “dandy.”
Gustave and Zero travel to the countess’s estate so that Gustave can pay his respects to the body of the countess and see if any of her estate has been left to him. When they arrive, they find her mansion crawling with greedy extended family members looking to benefit off their rich relative. The reading of the will is a crowded affair, filled with family members motivated only by greed. The countess’s children, whom Gustave knows to be ungrateful and unsavory, sit in the first row, like villains out of a penny dreadful novel. This is the first occasion in the film in which we meet anything close to an antagonist, and they are certainly dressed for the part.
In spite of his adamant appreciation for the finer things in life, and his minute attention to detail when it comes to everything from nail polish to hat position to fine wine, Gustave is not an innately greedy man, especially compared to the countess’ crooked and spoiled family members. Rather ironically, it is due to his selfless love for the countess that she ends up leaving him her most valuable item, a painting, which Gustave tells Zero is “priceless.” Gustave’s knack for living an aesthetic and artful life is rewarded by the countess with the gift of a markedly fine aesthetic object. This detail suggests that Gustave is not only a concierge and a Casanova, but more broadly an artist, having turned his work in the service industry into a kind of elevated art. His work is most fittingly rewarded with the inheritance of a beautiful actual work of art. Indeed, Gustave will cherish and value the painting more than any of the countess’ children would.
It is this tension between the artful and aesthetic Gustave and the countess’ brutish children that turns the film into a suspenseful “caper” of sorts. Soon after Dmitri threatens Gustave, Gustave and Zero steal the painting that was rightfully left to them, thus setting off a game of cat and mouse with the countess’s children. The fight between the two camps represents the fight between art and empty money-grubbing, between appreciation and inheritance. Gustave appreciates the beauty and aesthetic value of the painting, while Dmitri can only appreciate its financial value. Indeed, the painting is an especially apt object in this fight, as its subject—a young boy at the peak of youth holding an apple—symbolically celebrates the virtues of art and creativity. Soon enough, however, Gustave is having his own financial worries and wants to sell the painting to the black market, just moments after announcing that he will treasure and keep it forever.
