Summary
In the confession booth, Serge is waiting for them. He apologizes for betraying them, explaining that his family has been killed. When Gustave asks Serge to clear his name, Serge tells him, “I was the official witness in Madame D.’s presence to the creation of a second will to be executed only in the event of her death by murder…But they destroyed it…However, I pulled a copy…” Just then, Serge stops, and Gustave becomes more and more impatient for the information that Serge has to give, but the confession goes dark and Serge seems to disappear.
Zero and Gustave run to see what’s happened and find Serge on the other side, apparently strangled to death. They look over and see Jopling at the other end of the chapel, disguised in a monk’s robe, but he quickly runs out. Zero and Gustave run after him, but outside, he has already strapped on skis and begun to ski down the mountain. Zero spots a sled nearby and he and Gustave jump aboard to follow the psychopathic Jopling down the mountain.
At the bottom of the slope, Jopling takes a swig from a flask and walks over to a cliff, off of which Gustave is now hanging. Jopling stomps on the icy snow around Gustave’s hands, causing it to crack and make Gustave’s hold of the ledge more and more tenuous. Jopling thinks it’s the end for him, and begins reciting poetry, but suddenly Zero pushes Jopling over the cliff to his death and helps Gustave climb up to safety.
They are not safe for long, however. Henckels is on a nearby cliff with a megaphone and announces to Gustave that he is a “fugitive from justice.” Gustave turns to Zero and asks him what they should do. Zero suggests they go get Agatha and the painting Boy with Apple and head to the Maltese Riviera.
Zero and Gustave steal Jopling’s motorcycle and flee as a title card orients us in “Part 5: The Second Copy of the Second Will.” Moustafa narrates that “the war began by midnight,” and we see the lobby of the Grand Budapest Hotel filled with soldiers and hotel staff. Agatha comes in with boxes of baked goods “for the executive staff.” She then surreptitiously runs into a back room, looking for the hidden painting. Outside, Gustave and Zero wait in disguise in a Mendl’s truck.
As Gustave mourns the fact that the Grand Budapest has been set upon by soldiers, Dmitri pulls up to the hotel. Zero worries about Agatha’s safety in removing the painting, and we see her come out into the lobby carrying Boy with Apple, as a new concierge, Monsieur Chuck, welcomes Dmitri to the hotel. Dmitri immediately recognizes Agatha as she comes down the stairs and follows her as she scurries away from him up the grand staircase of the hotel. They both get on the same elevator, and Gustave and Zero come into the hotel pretending to be delivery boys from Mendl’s.
They sneak towards the service elevator and ask a new lobby boy where Agatha went. He directs them towards the elevator that she and Dmitri got on, and before they leave, Zero tells the new lobby boy that he hasn’t been trained properly. We see Agatha and Dmitri beside one another on the elevator. Dmitri begins to rip the paper on the painting and recognizes it as Boy with Apple. He follows her down a long hallway, and as they turn a corner, Agatha begins to run, Dmitri running after her.
On the sixth floor, Gustave and Zero run into Dmitri, who has lost Agatha. Dmitri takes a gun out of his sock, loads it and begins shooting at Gustave and Zero. As he continues to shoot, soldiers come out of their bedrooms on the floor of the hotel and begin shooting back. As Zero and Gustave hide in the elevator, Henckels comes up to the sixth floor and orders everyone to stop firing. “Who’s shooting who?” Henckels asks, and Dmitri informs him that Gustave and Zero are hiding in the elevator. Gustave fires back, telling Henckels that Dmitri is responsible for the death of Kovacs, Serge, Serge’s clubfooted sister, and the countess. Henckels has everyone arrested, when suddenly they are interrupted by a scream from outside.
Zero recognizes the scream as Agatha's and runs to go rescue her. He goes to a window and finds her hanging from a ledge, the painting precariously balanced on the ledge as well. Zero runs down to a room on a lower level, and just as he goes to break down the door, the hotel guest staying in the room opens it. Zero goes flying through the open window and ends up hanging from the exact same ledge as Agatha. As she starts to say something, the structure they are holding onto breaks and they fall down into the Mendl’s truck with a thud.
Both Zero and Agatha are safe in the pile of boxes of Mendl’s baked goods. After embracing, Agatha tells him, “Something’s on the back of the picture," and the camera zooms in on an envelope affixed to the painting. The envelope reads, “To be opened only in the event of my death by murder” and is signed by the countess.
Later, Agatha, Zero, Gustave, and Dmitri sit around a table as Henckels opens the envelope. As he reads it, Moustafa narrates in voiceover, “She left everything to Monsieur Gustave of course.” Gustave inherits a number of lucrative institutions, as well as the Grand Budapest Hotel itself. Zero becomes his successor, as his older self-narrates, “[Gustave] was the same as his disciples: insecure, vain, superficial, blond, needy. In the end, he was even rich. He did not succeed, however, in growing old.”
We see Gustave officiating Zero and Agatha’s wedding, attended by the concierges from the various other hotels. Moustafa narrates that two years later, Agatha and their son were killed by “the Prussian grippe, an absurd little disease.”
We see Agatha and Zero traveling with Gustave by train to Lutz. The train abruptly comes to a halt in a snowy field, and as they look out the window, they see a number of soldiers. A stone-faced soldier comes into the car and brusquely asks to see their documents. “You’re the first of the official death squads to whom we’ve been formally introduced,” says Gustave, cheerily, as the soldier checks their documents. When the soldier looks at Zero’s visa skeptically, Gustave tries to smooth the interaction over by showing the soldier the note from Henckels, but the soldier tears it up and asks Zero to come outside with him. When Gustave threatens to hurt the soldier should he lay a hand on Zero, the soldier knocks Zero out with the butt of his rifle and begins to fight with Gustave.
We see a tableau of all the hotel workers standing on the stage in the ballroom of the Grand Budapest for a moment before we are once again transported back to Moustafa and the author’s dinner. “In the end they shot him, so it all went to me,” Moustafa says, as the camera zooms out. Moustafa and the author go to get their keys from the concierge, but he is not at his post, so Moustafa gets them himself as the author narrates in voiceover, “Zero Moustafa had traded a great and important fortune for one costly, unprofitable, doomed hotel. Why? Was it merely sentimental?” When the author asks Moustafa why he keeps the hotel, and Moustafa tells him he keeps it for Agatha, before getting on the elevator and going up to his room.
The author sits in the lobby and writes. The film transports back to the original setting, and we see the older author writing the book version of The Grand Budapest Hotel. We then see the young girl from the opening shot reading the book to herself on a bench.
Analysis
Throughout the film, war has always been a distant and unimposing threat, more of a set piece than a plot point. In the final section of the film, however, it comes more clearly into view. The already chaotic plot—in which Gustave and Zero must evade the law and Dmitri while keeping Agatha and the painting safe and proving that Gustave is the rightful heir to the countess’ fortune—is now accompanied by the incursion of fascist powers. Still, the film stays light, like one of Mendl’s confections, and even the soldiers, in their black uniforms, are clownish and ridiculous. They too are portrayed as caricatures of soldiers, trigger happy to such an extent that at the sound of a single gunshot they begin feverishly shooting willy-nilly.
Wes Anderson’s whimsical style extends to his portrayal of a fascist military—their black lightning bolt flags seem like storybook Nazism—yet he does not shy away from showing the ways that such a political incursion can dampen and dim the national spirit. The sad toll that war takes on the region is primarily processed by a defeated Gustave. Gustave mourns the end of an era as he and Zero sit in the Mendl’s truck watching the hotel get overtaken by soldiers. He writes a poem of his own, saying, “The sad finale played off-key on a broken-down saloon piano in the outskirts of a forgotten ghost town. I’d rather not bear witness to such blasphemy.” He mourns the loss of the lavish hotel that was once his.
Indeed, having lived his life for the sake of luxury and style, Gustave’s criticism of fascism appears at first more aesthetic than political. He experiences the rise of a fascist regime through the lens of his line of work, and sees its advance, first and foremost, as an attack on his hotel and the hotel business. The hotel itself becomes a metaphor for civilization, in his eyes, and he cannot bear to see his refined kingdom overcome by bad taste and brutish attitudes. Indeed, when their train is stopped by the fascist troops on the way to Lutz, Gustave comments on his distaste for the officers’ “drab” uniforms. More than anything, he suggests, it is their uniforms that offend Gustave, as indeed, he always notices how something looks before he notices anything else.
But when it comes to Zero’s well-being, Gustave demonstrates his immense loyalty and his ability to stand up on behalf of principle, not just fashion. As the soldier asks Zero to come with him outside the train, Gustave immediately comes to Zero’s defense, threatens the soldier, and—as we later learn—dies on Zero’s behalf. It turns out that Gustave’s strict adherence to his own set of principles—however shallow they may seem at times—is connected to his profound sense of loyalty and his advocacy for his young protégé. Thus, Gustave is not only a dandy and an aesthete, but a noble and heroic figure in Zero’s life.
As Zero watches Gustave defend him on the train, he echoes something that Gustave once said to him about the hotel business and the pride that a hotel worker ought to take in their duties. He says, “There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity.” When Gustave said this earlier, he was talking about the care that one must take in a fine hotel like the Grand Budapest, but here, Zero uses Gustave’s words to describe Gustave himself, and to celebrate Gustave’s courage in standing up to the fascist soldier. In this way, the film conflates an attention to the finer things—aesthetics, hospitality, fine food, wine, service—with bravery and principle, and with the fortitude of civilization. In the face of fascism and injustice, Zero suggests, Gustave still wanted the best, however superficial.
