At the end of The Grand Budapest Hotel, decades after the central events, it is remarked of M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes), the film’s exceedingly courtly and crafty concierge hero, that “his world had vanished long before he ever entered it.” On its surface, the movie has, up to this point, shown us how Gustave’s old-world manners and code of honor were destroyed by the rise of totalitarianism and twentieth-century political violence. Now, this touching line suggests that these values had perhaps disappeared even earlier, and Gustave was merely living in their ruins without quite realizing it.