The European luxury hotel: symbol of fin-de-siècle elegance and aristocratic decadence; substantive physical reminders of a bygone era, behind whose pompous façades the unquiet ghosts of a faraway-so-close past still lurk… and the scene, also, of quite a few movies unpacking various aspects of the Continent’s troubled 20th century. Stops on our tour include Le Grand Hôtel des Thermes in Ostend (Harry Kümel’s Daughters of Darkness), the Grand Hotel des Bains on the Lido (Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice), and the titular institutions of Grigori Kromanov’s Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel and Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel. Amenities provided include fascist plots, erotic obsessions, and existential despair—but, alas, no turndown service.
