Motel Destiny. The review of the film by Karim Aïnouz

“Colour, for me, is like blood and translates a pulsation of life”. For Karim Aïnouz the figurative power of his cinema starts right there. It is precisely the color that lets the forms of melodrama explode in The invisible life of Eurídice Gusmão which fuels not only the visual contrasts but also the emotions of the two protagonists and creates a painting in movement as in Firebrand. Perhaps the risk, as seen in this latest film presented in competition at the Cannes Film Festival last year, is that the form risks suffocating the narrative. But Aïnouz’s cinema, in this respect, takes risks every time, gets back into the game. In Motel Destiny it overturns the structure of noir with monochromatics prevailing on red – but also on green and blue – which expand throughout the frame starting also from the reflections of the neon lights. Hélène Lovart’s photography, in her third collaboration with the director after the two titles mentioned above, lets the actors’ bodies interact with the background, strips them of their flesh and lets them move like shadows in space, in open contrast with the neutral images of video surveillance cameras. Furthermore, the same light on the beach, in the sunsets, appears first of all as colored backgrounds, which enhance the artifice of a gaze which this time finds the attractive meeting point between chromatic experimentation and the passionate element. In bringing the story of the two lovers to the screen, Motel Eden can appear as a psychedelic version of Douglas Sirk’s cinema that simultaneously updates the filth of noir from Cain’s The postman always rings twice.

The film is set in Ceará in August 2023, on the northeast coast of Brazil, where it is 30 degrees all year round. Every night at Motel Destino there are dangerous games of desire, power and violence. The cameras monitor every corner, the volume of the porn videos is always very high and can be confused with the moans and screams of pleasure from the sexual acts that are taking place between the customers in the rooms. One evening Heraldo, a 21 year old boy, also arrives on site. Then the woman who was with him disappears and he finds himself trapped in there. He doesn’t have the money to pay for the overnight stay but manages to leave leaving his documents. Then in the street he sees the body of the brother with whom he was supposed to escape and his life is also in danger. He thus returns to the motel, managed by the owner Elias and his wife Dayana who takes care of the cleaning. He desires her and mistreats her. Heraldo’s presence overturns their relationship and the rules of the motel.

Motel Destiny he is initially caged in his neon formalism but then frees himself. As The invisible life of Eurídice Gusmão but also Praia do futuro is another Aïnouz variation on the search for identity which here mixes with the tradition of pornographic comedy (pornochanchada), a very popular genre of Brazilian cinema of the 1970s. Between donkeys being abused, snakes in the tub, torn red sheets, the Brazilian filmmaker seems to use his writing, with which one of his students from the screenwriting school of Fortaleza Solo also collaborated, as a guide to starting from the details from which to develop a thriller erotic that captures in its morbidity and sensuality. Compared to the intensity of Praia do futurowhat how Motel Destiny takes up the place of the story in the title, there is the risk that the Brazilian filmmaker could find a compromise with an export cinema (Brazil’s co-production with France and Germany) which could risk directing him towards a mannered aestheticism. In the way he films the bodies, the places, the empty sensations, the abyss, his hand remains strongly recognisable.