Bright Colors Meet Dark Subjects

You can tell a lot about a movie based on its color palettes. Color evokes mood and tone. And few directors understand this quite as idiosyncratically as Wes Anderson. In pretty much all of his films, you could take any single frame and learn so much about the characters or plot. And it all comes down to how he uses color. For this blog, I will try and breakdown a single Wes Anderson color palette from one of his movies to see how his use of color plays with costumes, character development, and themes.

The fictional worlds evoked in film by director Wes Anderson have such a precise coloration – the very particular pastel-hues that paint the skies, drench the buildings and dress the characters. The hazy-hued lens through which we peer into the director’s unique world has a retro quality that casts his films in a nostalgia for a time that could have been. The muted pink of The Grand Budapest Hotel that makes the hotel itself the biggest character in the movie. He uses his color palette to split time periods in Grand Budapest. Each era’s saturated colors represent the mood at the time, specifically with regard to the hotel itself.

The film is divided into four timelines. The film starts with the fourth timeline, with a young girl walking through a cemetery to visit the bust of an elderly man. The scene is grim and should evoke a sadness and melancholic response. But the hue of colors presents us with a conflict. The scene tells us to feel sad while the color tries to make us cheerful. But as a person who has seen the film, will know why the scene is supposed to be a somber and grim reminder of what has happened in the past.

The very next scene shows us the elderly man in the third timeline, now revealed to be an author, giving a monologue that is inspiring as well as informative, a fact that is cemented by the brown hue of the scene, something that screams intelligence and figure of authority, a phenomenon I believe to have come from the classic brown shades of libraries and educational institutions.

The following scenes lead us through the introduction of to the hotel during the second timeline. The entire period showcasing the film involves lush colors in a very matte and darkish tone, almost as if inadequately lit. This gives the hotel, a very used and old feel, which compliments the scene in such a dazzling fashion as this timeline involves the younger self of the author, learning about the hotel and making observations that point out the age of the hotel and it’s dying state. The outside scenes involve a dead, almost low saturated green, lit in the pinkish hue of the frame. This follows on for the next minute or so, until we reach the main timeline or the first one.

The entirety of this timeline is matte, but the hotel scenes have a certain vibrancy to it. It reeks of new, happening and elite, everything the hotel upholds. All set in glorious hues of red, purple, pink, white, orange, yellow and brown, the significance of these colors is that they all gelled into a color scheme that shows an era gone by. A similar scheme is followed throughout the interior shots such as the one involving the train. Scenes involving the exterior and hostile environments are laden in colors of white, grey, brown and black, such as the jail and the residence of Agatha. The schemes here invoke a sense of abandon, misery and poverty.

Another example of the brilliant use of color to communicate feelings was when Monsieur Gustave first arrives in the prison, the colors are exclusively desaturated yellow and grey, but when we see Gustave making friends, the frames include sunshine yellow in increasing saturation, a color mostly associated with peace, friendship and happiness. They key aspect here is the increasing friendship between the inmates is reflected in the increasing saturation of the yellow shade in those specific scenes. Similar symbolism remains strewn throughout the film.

When we learn that Gustave did not grow old the scenes transform to a color palette of grayscale. The scenes are much less bright. The tragedy aspect of this film is highlighted here, as by the end, all characters that have become endearing, meet their untimely demise by politically motivated murder, disease, depression and old age. The end returns us back to the fourth timeline, with the young girl, sitting beside the bust of the now deceased author, in a gloomier area with a similar pink hue. The only difference being that the hue now no longer leads us to humor, but melancholy, representing a mystical property of color which is evoking contrasting emotions using the same color.

The Grand Budapest Hotel remains one of the finest films to have used framing and color. It is abundant in visual appeal and aesthetics, while having hidden metaphors and symbolism laid across the film. Whether we choose to go the extra mile, to observe and fully appreciate the symphony of moving images, is up to us. But in the humble opinion of this cinema addict, it would be a crime not to do so.