Sunday I saw Wes Anderson’s new film Grand Budapest Hotel and am happy to offer today’s song as a tie-in
of sorts. The film’s early going thoroughly enthralled me with its evocation of
a fading Hotel Grande, the kind celebrated in Procol Harum’s song from 1973.
What is the attraction? Both my first hearing of this album—around ten years
after it was released—and my viewing of Anderson’s film recalled to me the
evocations of the hotel by the sea in Cabourg that the narrator of the Recherche stays in as a boy. Something
of that sense of unsuspected confluences, of people coming together par hasard,
and of the sumptuous qualities of the setting combine to give me a little
frisson of imaginative splendor. As remarked in yesterday’s post, me and Marcel
share the tendency to find life not quite adequate to our imaginings. In
Anderson’s film, the character played so impeccably by Ralph Fiennes (one of
the finest actors of his generation) helps to recreate that sense of someone
for whom tawdry reality is just not good enough. While I may be aligning myself
with dandies in these comments, I have to say that the great contribution of
such refined types is that they make such heights of taste seem possible, even
as I accepted soon enough that such are not available in twentieth-century
America.
And look how dandified today’s song is: “Tonight we sleep on
silken sheets / We drink fine wines and eat rare meats.” That all may be easy
enough to do on your tour of any major city, but still. The spirit in which
this is delivered, in the full flower of PH’s prog-era willingness to ape
classic dance measures and to orchestrate their compositions sublimely (Procol
Harum’s album recorded with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra was a top ten LP
and the recasting of “Conquistador”—the 45 that was my first purchase by them—top
twenty). The spirit can be best summed up by the way, here, the foxtrot, after
that highly melodramatic sequence with orchestra and choir, segues into a trumpeting
guitar solo.
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| Keith Reid and Gary Brooker |
It’s all terrifically decadent as well, doubtless, which
would have held great attraction for me at one time. Not so much when I finally
got around to the album, but, even so, I like to think that the song inspired
the kind of imaginative flights that Anderson’s film also serves. Boy with Apple, the fictitious Old
Master painting that contributes to the plot of Grand Budapest Hotel, is the kind of “touch” that I find
delightful. For, in a sense, one’s idea of the sumptuous past is a matter of
oil paintings, back when the rendering of the tactile feel of material culture
was one of the highest arts. See how PH
lyricist Keith Reid gives us a taste here: “It’s mirrored walls, and velvet
drapes, / Dry champagne, and bursting grapes, / Dover sole, and Oeufs Mornay, /
Profiteroles and Peach Flambé.” Gary Brooker’s vocal, as ever, does a nice
tongue-in-cheek with Reid’s tendency to ornate lyrics; Brooker always sounds
like a lad from Hackney, thus undercutting any pretensions to aristocracy.
Procol Harum was hot at this time, in my view. The live
album with the orchestra, then Grand
Hotel, then the one I consider my favorite, Exotic Birds and Fruit. Glorious, ain’t it, squire? “It’s serenade
and Sarabande, / The nights we stay at Hotel Grande.” And who wouldn’t, with
the affable M. Gustave H. as concierge. But Anderson’s film would be less
affecting to me personally without the part of the writer, played by Jude Law.
For in that image of the solitary traveler who does nothing but soak up the
ambiance of a place and move on, I find one of my finest “abstract plane” type
of imaginings. And certainly the evocation of a vanished Europe—which is
already present in those great writers of the early part of the last century,
Proust, Mann—does much to recommend the film to me. A theme dear as well to Stefan Zweig (from
whose writings Anderson derives his tale) who, a nomad after the rise of Nazism
in Germany, took his life in a double suicide with his wife, in 1942, rather
than endure what the world was becoming. Très raffiné, no doubt, but far be it
from me to deplore the decision.
On Carousel and gambling stake
Our fortunes speed, and dissipate . . . .
Our fortunes speed, and dissipate . . . .
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