QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM CANNES

The word “motel” has a very different meaning in Brazil. These roadside facilities are not intended for travelling families and individuals to spend the night. They are aimed exclusively at horny couples looking for a discreet place to copulate for a couple of hours. The rooms are equipped with porn, water mattresses and hormone-inducing lighting. For the sake of their own privacy, customers may only enter the premises by car. They park their vehicle in an individual garage directly adjacent to their room. The corridor is only to be used by staff, who hands items (toothbrushes, condoms, food, etc) as required to the clients through an opening on the wall. This is also how their perform financial operations.

Fifty-eight-year-old Brazilian filmmaker Karim Ainouz is on familiar territory: the film set on the vast beaches of his native Ceara. Wagner Moura starred as gay lifeguard in Futuro Beach (2015), a movie taking place on a similarly paradisiacal location within the same Brazilian state. Motel Destino is a major improvement after the formulaic and boring Firebrand (which premiered just last year, also in the Official Competition of Cannes), but it does not achieve the same dramatic heights as the breathtaking melodrama The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao (which won the Best Picture Award of the Un Certain Regard section of the same Festival, exactly five years ago).

Fifty-something, muscular and menacing Elias (Fabio Assuncao) and his younger wife Dayane (Nataly Rocha) own and run one of such facilities. The sex hotel is located near the pristine dunes and vast beaches covering most of the Ceara’s coast. Twenty-year-old Heraldo (Iago Xavier) gets locked inside his room after his latest conquest takes his money and runs away with the key. He promises to come back with money to pay for his stay, and ends up working for the Elias and Dayane. Incidentally, he’s also running away from a dangerous criminal who assassinatedf his brother, in a slightly confusing plot set-up (which barely ever comes full circle).

The other developments are a lot clearer. Dayane become infatuated with the olive-skinned, handsome young man with the perfectly chiselled face and killer smile. Her husband has bisexual inclinations, and often flirts with their very seductive guest. Dayane and Heraldo eventually get on with it, and a steamy passion develops. There are countless sex scenes between the two, most of them under the demonic red light that illuminates such establishment. Ainouz and his DoP Hélène Louvart use the cheap artificial lighting commonly associated with motels to great results. red and blue are alternated in order to conveys different moods. This could have been ugly and cliched in a different context, but it works well here thanks to the nature of the sex hotels. In fact, the film opens with a strobe lighting warning. No need to cover your eyes, though. This is neither Gaspar Noe nor Bruce LaBruce: the light effects are nowhere near as jarring, and the sex is entirely simulated (which is a pity, a steamy film such as this merits some real-life action).

Two or more hypersexual and pathologically jealous males fighting for one self-assured and seductive female is one of the most common topics of Brazilian cinema, all the way from the classic Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (Bruno Barreto, 1976) to the more recent River of Desire (Sergio Machado, 2022). The little twist here is that at least one of the men is bisexual, and LGBT+ filmmaker Karim Ainouz keeps audiences guessing whether this will develop into a complete love triangle (where everyone fucks everyone), or if Elias will use his position of power in order to persuade the younger man into carnal action.

While extremely Brazilian, and with an ending that dodges some of the most facile trappings and cliches, Motel Destino lacks audacity. The sex is red, but it isn’t hot. Likewise with the story. There is nothing in here you haven’t seen before, plus there is no punch-in-the-face factor. The very final scene wraps the movie with an empty and predictable platitude about the inevitability of destiny. This is a 115-minute movie that would have benefitted from a little trimming both at the beginning and the end. Ainouz wrote the script himself in collaboration with Mauricio Zacxharias, based on a screenplay by Wislan Esmeraldo.

Motel Destino is showing in the Official Competition of the 77th Cannes International Film Festival.