Before the pink curtain rises

There is no film I’m more ready for this year than The Grand Budapest Hotel. Wes Anderson has been building toward something with this one—you can feel it in the promo images, which look less like stills from a movie and more like postcards from a country that never quite existed. Pastel pinks and mustard yellows, compositions so symmetrical they tip into parody and then quietly back out again.

The cast alone is deranged in the best possible way: Ralph Fiennes, F. Murray Abraham, Mathieu Amalric, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, Harvey Keitel, Jude Law, Bill Murray, Edward Norton, Saoirse Ronan, Léa Seydoux, Jason Schwartzman, Tilda Swinton, Tom Wilkinson, Owen Wilson. When a director assembles a roster like that, he’s making either a masterpiece or a very expensive vanity project. Anderson’s record suggests the former.

The premiere is scheduled for late February in Görlitz, the German city where part of it was shot—inside the Görlitzer Warenhaus, a grand early-twentieth-century department store whose faded splendor is apparently the soul of the film’s fictional hotel. The whole project feels like a love letter to a certain kind of European elegance that existed between the wars and died there too, the kind Stefan Zweig spent his career documenting before going into exile and eventually giving up entirely. Anderson presumably puts a funnier frame around that grief.

The photos are enough. I don’t need a trailer. Whatever the film turns out to be, it already looks like the most beautiful thing I’ll see all year.