Frame Narrative

A frame narrative is a story within a story—or, if you're Wes Anderson, a story within a story within a story within a story.

That's right, before we hit the ten-minute mark in the film, we've already visited four distinct time periods and three distinct locations. The first is a post-1985 Zubrowka, where we see the grave of the Author and a girl with her Grand Budapest book.

The second is 1985, where we enter the home of the Author who prepares to tell us about the story he wrote.

The third is 1968, where we see the Author in the Budapest itself, where he meets Mustafa.

The fourth is, of course, the heart of the story; it's Zubrowka in 1932, where our true protagonists are finally introduced.

What's the point then with all this frame narrative nonsense? We know it's a movie. Why not just start it off with Gustave and Zero and end it with Gustave and Zero? They're the film's heart and soul, after all.

Well, not only does the frame narrative allow for a moment of world building (and for the audience to adjust to and accept the fictionalized Eastern European country of Zubrowka), but it also begins to thematically explore things like memory and the past— creating a feeling of the grandeur of an era (and hotel, and man) long gone.

Memoir

The frame narrative does something else, too—it gives us a narrator. Make that two narrators. The first is the Author, who tells us about meeting Mustafa, giving us intimacy and insight into who Zero has become in his later years. The second is Mustafa himself, providing that same information for Gustave.

These character/narrator combinations are infamously unreliable, and yet we never find ourselves questioning the accuracy or authenticity of the story we hear. Perhaps it doesn't matter at all what exactly happened, or precisely how it transpired. What matters more, as is the case with memoir, is how the past brings itself to bear in the present.