Chris Flackett
If there is such a thing as fate, how would you escape it? For how long can you put off the inevitable? Can you hide out until fate loses your trail? Can love redeem a a path destined to end in death? These are just some of the questions raised by Motel Destino, director Karim Aïnouz’s colour-drenched, erotically-charged thriller, which played at the Manchester Film Festival this past weekend.
Heraldo (Iago Xavier) is a young gun in the country in Brazil, working as muscle for a drug-dealing matriarch, but plans to head off to Sāo Paulo to start a new life. The matriarch will grant Heraldo this freedom in exchange for one last debt-collection job with his brother. Distracted that evening by the charms of a woman he meets in a bar, Heraldo finds himself in the titular love motel, only to be abandoned in the morning, his wallet emptied of money. When he gets back home, Heraldo finds his absence from the planned job has had the domino effect of the job going wrong and his brother having been killed in the process. Fearing that the matriach will come for him to obtain retribution, Heraldo flees back to the Motel Destino to hide out until the coast is clear. However, when he comes under the wing of motel owners Elias (Fábio Assunção), with his seedy and violent veneer, and his lonely wife Dayana (Nataly Rocha), Heraldo discovers that fate cannot be so easily slipped away from…
Saturated in rich, gorgeous light and colours, all hazy, as if from the sun in a tropical heat, or perhaps slightly hallucinatory, Motel Destino benefits from the first-rate composition work of cinematographer Hélène Louvart. This is a beautiful film to simply look at, a literal film-painting that brashly, joyously evokes the heat of the world it presents, a kind of dangerous carnival for the uninhibited and sexually-charged.
Make no mistake, Motel Destino is an erotic thriller, with all that implies: emphasis on sex and sex scenes, full-frontal nudity, and unabashed openness about what humans can and will do to each other’s bodies. I’m certainly no prude, but to the film’s credit it handled its sex scenes tastefully, forcing the viewer to confront the vulnerability and sensuality of the human naked body, the hunger of desire, the thrill of intimate connection, putting this theme front and centre of the film rather than using its sex scenes as filler material for cheap gratification.
The majority of the film takes place in the titular motel, and the enclosed space takes on a surreal, sinister aspect, with secret peep holes into the rooms for Elias to watch his customers, washes of light like cheap, seductive mood lighting, and curious dark nooks and crannies where illicit couplings between staff can take place, but certainly shouldn’t, lest they be discovered. There is a constant soundtrack of sexualised moaning coming from the various rooms, to the point that after a while the moans lose their strangeness and become normalised.
This normalisation applies to both Elias and Dayana, both in their own little bunker mindsets enforced by rarely leaving the motel. Elias is controlling, proud but gone to seed, careful to obtain power over his customers and staff at all costs. Dayana, meanwhile, hopes for better things, but sadly resigns herself to what she believes to be her fate. Heraldo, meanwhile, is younger and less jaded, but as his libido leads him deeper into the motel’s web, even he begins to believe he is delaying the inevitability of death. Yet, as the film makes clear, the possibility of love acts as a counter-balance to fatalism, and where there is possibility there is hope.
Motel Destino succeeds in drawing viewers into its world, and its disturbingly enjoyable (if that’s the right word) world to find yourself in. It’s a shame, then that the film doesn’t quite stick the landing, with a very on-the-nose visual metaphor disrupting the momentum the climax is gunning for, as well as a character action that makes sense when you consider their attitude to fate, but isn’t entirely satisfying as a resolution.
Still, these criticisms aside, Motel Destino is a confident, unashamed look at fate, sexuality, and sensuality—the desire for connection, human intimacy, and the body as a metaphor for the vulnerability of human relationships—all within a gorgeously colourful, off-kilter, violent and often amusing framework. Very much recommended.
The Manchester Film Festival is the UK city’s historic “biggest celebration of the best new and independent film”. Now in its 11th year, Film Obsessive is there to bring you coverage of some of the brightest and best films being screened across the festival week.
