Revelore provides Fiennes an able straight man, as the two navigate an art heist, a prison break, a murderous, euro-trash Willem Defoe on a motorcycle, and a stop-motion animated, winter sports-themed chase scene. All this plays out against Anderson’s splendorous mis-en-scene, teeming with visual gags.
Yet Anderson laces this delicious frivolity with a sorrow appreciable only upon digestion. While the violence and upheavals of the era are kept to the film’s edges, we’re repeatedly asked to gaze out to that horizon.
Late in the film, Zero reveals to Gustave that his entire family was killed in an unspecified conflict. Gustave, and the film’s other principle character, Zeros’ girlfriend Agatha, are likewise bereft of all family, for reasons that remain opaque. We learn in the film’s spiraling epilogue that Gustave dies at the hands of fascist police, and that Zero loses Agatha and their unborn child to a bout of grippe. Thus the space on either side of our jaunty narrative is defined by overwhelming loss.