Dir: Karim Ainouz | 110′
Review by PETER HERBERT
Motel Destino checks in with the return home of the Brazilian film maker Karim Ainouz after German/UK and Brazilian co productions including The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao, Futuro Beach and Firebrand.
Many changes have happened since Ainouz made his hard-hitting Brazilian debut with the charismatic portrait of Madame Sata in 2002 and the new film is specific about how Ainouz feels about the current state of Brazilian filmmaking.
Motel Destino is a deliberate reaction to the safe homogenous globalisation of film industries brought about by films made and marketed for the streaming audience. Ainouz has rooted the film’s source energy in the traditions, ethics and the ethos of organic Brazilian cinema. These include film noirs of the 1940/50s which took inspiration from American film noir and the gutsy soft/hardcore porn related sex comedies of the 1960/70’s. Ainouz also acknowledges plot points and visual nods traceable to the Coen Brother’s Blood Simple and Toshio Matumoto’s A Funeral Parade of Roses.
The plot, which is occasionally a little loose or unclear, could be lifted from any number of American film noirs, from Woman on the Run through to Detour with specific reference to The Postman Always Rings Twice. Visconti’s original film of the James M Cain novel (filmed as Obsession) may well be the key as its central character Hernando (played by Iago Xavier) is forced to run for his life after a criminal hit goes wrong and his brother is murdered.
Seeking refuge in a motel after he has been fleeced and abandoned, he gets rather more than he bargained for, as Motel Destino is a place for sexual hedonism, attracting through the day and night all sorts of lost souls, wayward sinners and marginalised waifs.
Unlike Hernando’s camp hideaway in The Pyjama Game , the hideaway for Hernando here becomes a mesmerising private space for exploring the possibilities of relationships and sexuality.
An affair develops between Hernando and the owner’s wife (played by Nataly Rocha), while her husband (Fabio Assuncao) begins to grapple with his own uneasy repressed desire for Heraldo.
The lovers will slowly but surely become embroiled in a deepening and tangled web of danger involving vengeful gangsters. Animals fascinate Ainouz and the noises of a cat, donkeys, goats and a snake become a virtual dawn chorus of cacophony, mirroring sounds that people make during sex.
Ainouz bathes the film’s day and night time interior scenes with a gorgeous fluorescent palette of artificial colours while outdoor scenes on beaches glow with unfiltered Brazilian sunlight. It is an intoxicating double palette of visual cinematography by Helene Louvart.
Motel Destino is a startling, vivid film with rough edges involving characters on a journey into a garden of Eden containing succulent fruits which may also prove to be highly dangerous. The allusions to a dangerous but enticing garden gathers momentum as revenging gangsters close in on the lovers, who escape totally naked, as if they are innocent children with nothing to hide except the desire to achieve redemption from a fate that could also mean death. Motel Destino is a new development for a filmmaker returning to home roots after a decade of filmmaking in other countries.
MOTEL DESTINO 2024 .1 hr 50 mins. Screening 2/5/25 Curzon Soho with director Q and A by Karim Ainouz