Love Hotel (Somai, 1985): Nickel Cinema, 8.15pm
Dazed introduction to Shinji Somai:'When it comes to filmmaking auteurs, Somai, a previously forgotten master of 1980s Japanese cinema, is not a name that has always been afforded much attention in Western criticism. But off the back of passionate new appraisals by contemporary filmmakers, a first US-based retrospective of his films in New York in 2023, and a string of UK home media releases in 2024, the director is now rightly getting his dues overseas – some two decades after his death from lung cancer at the age of just 53.' The Nickel Cinema are showing one of his lesser known films here.
Nickel Cinema introduction:
In a single
night inside a Tokyo love hotel, two damaged lives intersect under
the pressure of desperation, fantasy, and self-erasure. A failed
businessman planning his own death hires a call girl, only for their
transaction to unravel into something unstable and emotionally raw.
Love Hotel operates within the framework of pink cinema, yet
consistently resists its expectations, redirecting erotic spectacle
toward exhaustion, confession, and psychological exposure. Sex here
is not titillation but a temporary suspension of consequence—a
space where shame can be voiced without permanence. Shinji Sōmai’s long
takes and restless camera movement trap the characters in real time,
refusing narrative shortcuts or moral framing. The hotel room becomes
a liminal zone between performance and collapse, where power shifts
moment to moment and intimacy feels both compulsory and unreachable.
Stripped of glamour and redemption, Love Hotel presents desire as a
survival mechanism already failing, and connection as something
briefly possible only when nothing else remains intact.
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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