Outsiders between the earth and sky
David Ondricek’s Grandhotel [+see also:
trailer
film profile] is not one of these films whose deeper meaning can be read between the lines. Like the patchwork weaved by its hero Fleishmann, from the lofty heights where he lives, the film is an incongruous and charming mosaic of daily neuroses, a panoply of portraits, set between the earth and the sky, between the here and now, in a mountain-top hotel (an awe-inspiring location, done justice by the photography) in the Czech town of Liberec – a little town one would like to leave, but cannot.
Choosing as its subjects the hotel staff – that is, the people living permanently in this liminal place of transit – Ondricek paints a portrait (an unconventional one, of course) of their modest existence. Without reaching the heights of folly in Wim Wenders’ Million Dollar Hotel, each character exhibits certain idiosyncrasies.
Starting with hotel caretaker and outsider Fleishmann and his strange obsession for meteorological forecasting (and the passivity of an observer that goes with it), strict diet of wafers and orange soda, lack of interest in sex and panic-stricken fear of leaving Liberec (to the point of leaping from the bus on approaching the village outskirts).
His colleagues display equally as paralysing fears and obsessions. A first places blind faith in women’s magazines and slimming pills, a second lives for his collection of porn films, while a third is physically incapable of saying "I love you" and spends her time measuring not temperatures and rainfall but her fertility, while her boyfriend dreams of the US and "business". In short, each character is trying to escape something.
Despite this, it is not a sad film, but intensely amusing and touching (just like supermarket king and war hero Franz’ absurd sayings), and its characters’ paralyses are not all that hopeless. As Ondricek described to an enthusiastic audience in a packed auditorium: "One has the impression that the Czech Republic is suffering from a ‘loser’ syndrome. I don’t like this word and I don’t think it is true either. With this film, I wanted to show that we shouldn’t be afraid to deal with things".
As Franz says: "Life is like a game of tennis, everyone has the right to a second serve, but you also need to have the energy to pick up the ball".
(Translated from French)
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