After last year’s excruciatingly dull Tudor drama Firebrand, Karim Ainouz is already back on the big screen with Motel Destino, bringing the director back to his native Brazil. The return has certainly made for a breezier, more confident film than its immediate predecessor, but the English turgidness hasn’t been entirely flushed out of Ainouz’s system. Here is a tale of a small-time gangster hiding out in a surreal sex motel, where an affair with the volatile owner’s wife looms and the sounds of loud anonymous sex pierce every wall and, yet, if it wasn’t for the extraordinary efforts of DP Helene Louvart and her magnificent visuals, Motel Destino would defy its premise to still be a bit, well, boring.
The small-time gangster in question is Heraldo (Iago Xavier), a man barely in his 20s who values getting laid above all else. It’s this priority that wrecks his life, spending the night before a planned robbery with a stranger in the seedy eponymous motel, only to wake up to find that he’s overslept and that she’s stolen his money and locked him in the room. Heraldo gets to the job too late, his partner (and brother) already shot dead by the target’s security, leaving him stunned by grief and targeted by his old boss for his conspicuous failure.
To hide out, he moves into the Destino, working as a live-in handyman for the boss Elias (Fabio Assuncao) and his wife Dayana (Nataly Rocha). Both husband and wife clearly find Heraldo irresistible, and it’s not long before Heraldo is having yet more ill-advised sex with Dayana, risking both his hiding place and his life if the explosively jealous Elias ever finds out. It’s a plot that promises sleazy thrills, but only half-delivers – the sex scenes themselves are very well-marshalled, urgent and tender and just very sexy, but outside of these moments (and one incredible dance sequence), Ainouz keeps us at arm’s length.
Heraldo keeps having genuinely creepy visions and nightmares of his future fate, but that rising danger never makes itself felt in the waking world as the lead trio mostly just go about their days dealing with the business of running a gross motel; cleaning jizzy sheets, restocking sex toys, and taking quick hits of any drugs that get left behind. By design, Motel Destino never feels quite real, with even the motel itself feeling like it was lifted straight out of a dream, but by also not descending fully into madness until the very end, it gets stuck between two worlds, not really convincing in either.
Luckily, this is where Louvart comes in. She and Ainouz have created what is by far the best-looking film of the year to date (no surprise really, Louvart also shot last year’s most visually stunning film with La Chimera), full of gorgeous Brazilian sunlight and colours so rich you could practically eat them with a spoon. It’s this that makes Motel Destino, despite some pretty glaring flaws, a real must-see on a big screen – if nothing else, you’ll come out of it feeling like you yourself have just spent a week on the Brazilian beach, and it’s a ravishing place to be.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 