It takes a special kind of cinephile to appreciate a feel-bad masterpiece like Shinji Somai’s Love Hotel. The film is ostensibly an erotic drama, produced by Japan’s Nikkatsu Studios towards the end of its “Roman Porno” series. A subset of “pink” filmmaking—broadly, Japanese films of any genre built around sex and nudity—“Roman Pornos” were marketed as classy, yet naughty affairs, movies that delivered the softcore goods but that you wouldn’t be totally humiliated watching in public. Aside from the requirement of a nude scene every ten minutes, filmmakers were given artistic freedom on these projects; for Somai, that meant hard-hitting explorations of the after-effects of trauma, filmed in Chantal Akerman-esque long takes. And a lot of nudity.
Somai’s use of the long-take style in Love Hotel is exquisite. Jack calls the approach “raw and emotionally cutting,” while Fred writes that Somai—who was actually better known for his coming-of-age films—“weave[s] the erotic and dramatic into single sustained sequences, capturing a multitude of the characters’ emotions while doing so.” The camera molds bare limbs into sculptural shapes, using mirrors to reflect the characters’ twisted physical and mental states back onto each other in cramped hotel rooms and shabby apartments.
There are scenes of sexual violence, but what’s most upsetting is the overall mood of alienation and despair. It’s a devastating portrait of two broken people desperately grasping at whatever connection they can find: Joshua calls it “a story about wanting to reclaim selfhood through others,” a theme that’s particularly devastating when applied to Nami (Noriko Hayami), the film’s female lead. Nami’s interactions with men have left her so traumatized that she doesn’t know how to express herself except through sex. What she really wants is to be cared for. But she pursues degradation instead, because that’s all she knows.
Somai’s sympathetic portrayal of Nami reminded me of Mikio Naruse, who also documented the struggles of women in postwar Japan with films like When a Woman Ascends the Stairs. It’s just that, in Somai’s case, they come embellished with city pop, neon and bondage. Love Hotel is a whalloper, and a must see for the type of person who likes movies that leave them emotionally drained. A new 4K restoration debuts at the Metrograph theater in New York this month, with an expansion to follow.
