Director: Karim Aïnouz
Year: 2024
Karim Aïnouz is one of those filmmakers. If he makes it, run – don’t walk – to see it. It’s not always easy to track down his work outside Brazil. (I’m still searching for a way to see O Céu de Suely / Love for Sale.) So if it comes your way, seize the moment and savour it; his work tends to be not just narratively compelling, but exquisitely beautiful to look at.
His recent(ish) thriller, Motel Destino, exemplifies this. Heraldo (Iago Xavier), a young man getting by as a minor henchman in a northeastern coastal town, finds himself in need of a hideout. A chaotic sexual encounter yields just the place: a murky, neon-signed knocking shop, run by Elias (a highly sinister Fábio Assunção), a man as seedy and chaotic as his place of business. His wife Dayana (Nataly Rocha) takes a shine to the fugitive, and in a more ambiguous and threatening way, so does the owner – and so begins the yin/yang of a heated affair and a delicately balanced power struggle amid the peepholes corridors and sweat-soaked sheets of the Motel Destino.
The cinematography and production design are a work of art, juicily attuned with the surreal environment Heraldo finds himself in. Filmed on location in Aïnouz’ native Céara, blisteringly close to the equator, Motel Destino sits on a scorched roadside with nothing else around it. Life within passes in a timeless void, a relentless haze of UV-lit sex, clean-up and killing time. Every scene is a collection of hot, super-saturated snapshots, paying frequent homage to giallo cinema. They look like abstract paintings; a sexy, geometric exercise in colour-blocking, faces lit red and blue as events oscillate between dream and nightmare.
The camera surveys the drama as hungrily as the motel’s shrieking guests, seducing us with a crisp, simplistic kind of beauty and making our attraction to the film something as voyeuristic and feverishly consumptive as what goes on within the motel’s caverns. We, like the guests, are invited to sate ourselves on what we see. Turmeric-yellow walls planed against a spotless tropical sky… fizzing pink neon lighting the rumpled beds under azure walls and ceilings; much like the patrons, for one night only the scuzzy and disheveled is rendered delicious.
But of course, once you’re in, you’re captured, and as the cheap glamour peels off, something darker and more unhinged is revealed below the surface.
Aïnouz’s work communicates a fascination with sexuality, power and alienation, and how they influence and warp each other. Many of his films explore characters who push these boundaries; an abandoned woman who raffles off her own body; two friends warring bitterly for the attention of a prostitute; a man who ghosts his family to run away with his lover. And here, a vulnerable man sleeping with the wife of man who has him under his thumb. The situations aren’t remarkable, but Aïnouz’s handling of them often is.
His highly charged scenarios are often routes into what’s really going on; grief, exile, fear of abandonment, and indeed the need for power and control. Heraldo finds love in a hopeless place while grappling with loss, guilt, the siren of his survival instinct and a deep sense of rage at his own familial situation – a complex combination that Xavier allows to simmer below the surface without overplaying the situation or spilling into melodrama. Between Aïnouz’s writing and Xavier’s controlled performance, Motel Destino treats him kindly as a protagonist, letting this anger shape a tenderness in him toward Dayana that’s deeply at odds with what her violent bully of a husband dishes out. Extramarital it may be, as but as the sticky walls of the motel close in, we’re all rooting for their survival.
And that goes to the heart of Aïnouz’s work, and why it’s so compelling. He doesn’t treat cinematic sex as something sordid or titillating, but centres the human beings in its maelstrom. He uncovers its power dynamics, and uses it to tell stories about who these people really are – these vulnerable, hopeful characters with limited options, fumbling for human connection and something better and more vivid than the lives laid out for them. His films are essentially about the human condition and, at its tachycardic heart, Motel Destino is essentially a very sweet love story.
