Elaborate, ephemeral, and exceedingly difficult to pull off, the souffle takes a serious amount of skill, experience, and precision to make, but typically takes just a few moments to eat. Its reputation as a symbol of culinary luxury is both due to the difficulty of its making and the simplicity in its eating, the knowledge that such care and effort went into producing such a trifle. Gastón Solnicki’s The Souffleur is a similar thing — like any movie, it’s the result of extensive care and effort in its making, but it’s brief, light, and perhaps a little insubstantial in its eating.
A luxury hotel may be a similar thing, too. In The Souffleur, Lucius Glantz (Willem Dafoe) is the manager of the Hotel Intercontinental Vienna, an establishment that’s basked long enough in its own glamour that it’s fast become faded, and is set for redevelopment after being bought by Argentinian realtor and would-be designer Facundo Ordoñez, played by Solnicki himself. The hotel is Glantz’s pride and joy — he mingles with guests, waters the basement ice rink, tends to minor technical problems, and only seems to set foot outside it to deal with hotel-related issues. The details of Glantz’s work, normal in this scenario, nevertheless appear absurd to the objective eye — hosing down an ice rink may seem like an unnecessary chore to most, but then luxury is never necessary. His narration describes the hotel in near-parodically lofty terms: we learn that it was the first hotel in the world to have telephones in every bathroom. A trifle, indeed.
Solnicki, like his character, has a fascination for architectural spaces, though he may belittle himself somewhat in the casting, since the character supposedly has little talent for actually understanding these spaces. In static shots, Solnicki both examines existing environments and creates new ones. He has a fabulous appreciation for how space, scale, and proximity define people’s states of mind, and for how the depiction of these on film can define the viewer’s own appreciation of the action. There is, thus, a direct connection developed between the on-screen physical space and the cerebral space. The hotel is a large, grand environment populated here and there by a random assortment of employees and guests; the brain is an environment itself, populated by even more random thoughts and impulses. Ordoñez’s decision to purchase the hotel, the result of a lifelong obsession after a visit in his childhood, is perplexing to Glantz and his associates; equally perplexing are some of Glantz’s utterances on Ordoñez, at one point narrating, “I wonder how it would feel to punch him in the face.”
The Souffleur is swift but gentle, a touch opaque, but sincere, and not without profundity. It’s concerned with identity and how it is formed, specifically in relation to one’s environmental circumstances. Glantz is an American with a German name living in Austria, his successor is an Argentinian, and the guests are from across the globe. Who is Glantz? How has the hotel informed his identity, or those of its many other employees, including his daughter, Lilly (Lilly Lindner)? And how have they informed the hotel’s identity? Solnicki apparently prefers to pose these questions coyly than to proffer answers to them, concerning himself with poetic asides, like a mournful piano duet that brings Glantz first to tears and then to maniacal laughter, and quirky gags, like a city council meeting that Glantz interrupts to read aloud a section from a book about alpacas. The alpaca on the book’s cover gurns, and the meeting’s attendees shrug.
If the opacity of what Solnicki’s getting at in The Souffleur is offset by the film’s lightness of tone, and vice versa, these two elements don’t quite gel — like the souffle sampled by Glantz in an early scene, it may have risen, but it doesn’t taste exactly right. Still, Solnicki works with confidence, and obvious skill, and that counts for something. And his propensity for leaving matters unresolved does have some lasting impact, as when one character gives Glantz a mysterious piece of life advice: “In the struggle between the world and yourself, hold the world’s coat.” Had the film as a whole left the same level of impact as some of its individual aspects, it might have been more than a trifle. Still, for as long as it lasts, it’s a pleasant enough little dish.
Published as part of LFF 2025 — Dispatch 1.
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