by Victor Pryor
The New York Asian Film Festival runs from June 26 to July 11. For more details, click here.
For those who don’t know what a “love hotel” is, director Ryuichi Hiroki provides a succinct explanation:
“A love hotel is a wonderful place. You can rent rooms by the hour.”
The implications that can be taken away from that are, of course, entirely accurate.
Kabukicho Love Hotel, which had its New York premiere this past Saturday, is an ensemble dramedy covering 24 hours in the lives of various employees, customers, and passers-by.
It’s not a typical day, but then again, there probably aren’t a whole hell of a lot of those at a love hotel.
The film opens with Toru (Shota Somatani) and Saya (Atsuko Maeda), an affectionate, if not particularly passionate, couple. Saya is an aspiring musician and Toru is about to head out on his overnight shift as a hotel front desk manager.
He is, perhaps unsurprisingly, somewhat cagey on the exact nature of the hotel. Which may or may not come back to bite him the end…
There are, of course, other threads to follow. The cleaning woman with a dark past; the hostess (euphemism) who is on her last day of work before she heads back to open a boutique in Korea; a procurer who picks up a runaway with the intention of turning her out; a drugged out, overly aggressive customer with a sob story all his own; and a full-on prostitute lingering outside, her life a roadmap of regrets.
All of this sounds like the stuff of high drama, but what’s most surprising about Kabukicho Love Hotel is how funny it is. There are, to be sure, very dark themes at play, but just as in real life, tragedy and despair are co-mingled with laughter and the farcial.
Which comes at little surprise, considering that in the after-film Q&A director Hiroki cited his main influence as Robert Altman.
Few directors were as gifted balancing the dramatic and the absurd as Altman. But somehow, Hiroki does his inspiration one better, as the movie is utterly devoid of the rampant cynicism and occasional misanthropy that could poison Altman’s lesser moments.
An even more fascinating influence: Clint Eastwood, whose Spartan point-and-shoot philosophy served Hiroki well on what turned out to be a two-week shoot. Not that the swiftness in the filming is even remotely obvious to the viewer: this movie, with it’s long panning hallway shots, limpid neon greens, and sensual sapphires, looks better than anything Eastwood has ever shot, bar none.
Sometani, who was on hand to accept the Screen International Rising Star award, makes for an interesting anchor for all the goings-on here. His Toru is by no means a dynamic presence, reacting to most of what unfolds with a certain deadpan stoicism (which, indeed, provides many of the movies biggest laughs). But that’s kind of the point.
His reticence and reserved nature makes him a difficult protagonist to get a grip on, which makes it all the more impressive that he’s able to carry the film as well as he does. Not many people can hold the screen by doing so little, and it really does mark Sometani out as one to watch for.
(Also in attendance was Kaho Minami, who provides the movie’s funniest subplot with her fugitive cleaning lady matching wits with a determined detective, and proved to be a quite charming guest in her own right.)
In his pre-film introduction, Hiroki said to watch till the end credits for “a little bit of hope,”which gave the impression that the movie was going to be a bleak slog. But it was in fact, anything but. Kabukicho Love Hotel is a sprawling, hilarious, erotic, lovely, melancholy, uplifting, emotionally powerful glimpse at a world most people never see.
Highly recommended.
