Berlin Film Festival 2014: Day 1

The 64th Berlin Film Festival opens with a giddy ride through Europe’s backwaters tonight with the premiere of Wes Anderson’s long anticipated The Grand Budapest Hotel. A riot of colour and pattern that occasionally looks like characters marching (or generally scampering) through photoshoot interiors, The Grand Budapest Hotel is a telescope of fictions, of stories within stories that Anderson pursues with his usual visual flair and sardonic gusto. And it’s a who’s who of the best of world cinema – with appearances from Ralph Fiennes, Tilda Swinton, Bill Murray, Saiorse Ronan, Edward Norton, Léa Seydoux, Jude Law, Owen Wilson, Willem Dafoe, Adrien Brody, Jeff Goldblum, Mathieu Amalric, Harvey Keitel, Jason Schwartzman, Tom Wilkinson (the list goes on) and introducing Tony Revolori as the lobby-boy-done-good whose story provides the backbone to The Grand Budapest Hotel. It may leave some of Europe’s finest actors with little more than a cameo, but at least over the next ten days, there’s plenty more to come.