Ever So Slowly I Go Into the Night
The profound sorrow of Shinji Sômai's 'Love Hotel' (1985)
When struggling businessman Tetsuro Muraki’s (Minori Terada) publishing company goes bankrupt, yakuza thugs rape his wife Ryoko (Kiriko Shimizu) in retaliation for unpaid debts. After witnessing the ordeal, he succumbs to despair and decides to end his life — but not without taking someone else with him. In a fit of misdirected rage, he calls a sex worker (Noriko Hayami), who introduces herself as “Yumi,” to the love hotel he is staying at and prepares to vent his frustrations on her before committing suicide. Tetsuro, wearing a dark suit and sunglasses — his attire recalls Joe Shishido’s gangster getup in Branded to Kill (1967) — handcuffs her and begins subjecting her to sexually exploitative torture, but before he can go through with his plan, he has a sudden change of heart after seeing the anguish in the young woman’s face. He flees the hotel room, leaving Yumi bound to the bed, moaning loudly from the vibrator he has left inside her.
Two years later, Tetsuro lives a quiet life as a taxi driver and has divorced Ryoko in order to protect her from the loan sharks who are still after him. The two maintain something of a relationship — they still have sporadic, unenthusiastic sex — but their dynamic has been irreversibly altered by the sexual assault and the resentment he feels towards her is palpable in the scenes they share. While on a night shift, Tetsuro comes across the sex worker he had planned to kill two years earlier, now going by “Nami.” She hails his cab, not recognizing the driver as her attacker, and asks him to drive her to Yokohama so she can see the beach, making cryptic reference to “returning to the mermaid kingdom.” Once there, Tetsuro realizes that Nami actually plans to commit suicide and intervenes, revealing his identity to her in the process. Although she runs away, denying ever having met him, she calls the taxi service the next day and requests a pickup from him specifically. She admits to remembering the traumatic episode — she even recalls the room in which it occurred, Room 301 — and the two attempt to come to terms with what transpired that night.
Shinji Sômai’s 1985 erotic drama Love Hotel exceeds the thematically modest ambitions of a lot of its pink film peers by expanding its scope beyond mere titillation and grasping at something more profound and melancholy. Granted, some of the pinku genre’s most noteworthy filmmakers — Atsushi Yamatoya, Banmei Takahashi, Hisayasu Satô — have fused transgressive sensual pleasures with more ponderous, philosophical subject matter (and a good deal of formal experimentation) but the emotional register of Sômai’s film is more aligned with that of a quiet character drama than the lurid sexuality pinku eigas are usually associated with, spinning a tale of two damaged people forging a doomed connection through their shared sense of alienation.
Sitting in a cab together for the second time, Nami asks Tetsuro why he changed his mind about the murder-suicide. “The expression on your face was like a mirror,” he answers. His sudden moment of clarity in the hotel room echoes the ending of Flannery O’Connor’s famous short story A Good Man Is Hard to Find, wherein the grandmother looks at the ruthless killer known as the Misfit — who at that point has already killed the woman’s son, daughter-in-law, and two grandkids — and “[sees] the man’s face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry.” Recognizing a part of herself in the murderous fiend allows her to offer him the opportunity of grace, warmly touching his shoulder and telling him “[he is] one of [her] babies.” “She does the right thing,” as O’Connor herself put it, “she makes the right gesture.”
But just as the Misfit has cut himself off from grace — he kills the defenseless old lady with three gunshots to the chest — Love Hotel’s central duo, in spite of their frequent graceful gestures (Tetsuro calling Nami his “angel” is an inversion of the grandmother’s words to the Misfit), can’t conceive of love outside of reckless affairs and self-destructive sadomasochism. The very setting of their initial meeting reflects this disparity: the term “love hotel” is a polite-society misnomer for establishments that are mainly hookup spots for sex workers and their clients — the backdrop for a loveless transaction.
Although Nami at first claims to have blacked out during Tetsuro’s attack, she does, in fact, recall the fateful night and has spent her life since then trying to leave those semi-repressed memories behind. Having quit sex work after the painful incident — she claims it was her “first and last time” — she now has a straight, decently compensated office job. Her somewhat humdrum middle-class existence is, however, complicated a great deal by the affair she is having with her married boss and after his wife finds out about their liaison, he fires Nami, putting the kibosh on the career she worked so hard to build. Now at her lowest, she turns to Tetsuro in hopes of not only recreating the disturbing sexual encounter they had in the dimly lit room at the love hotel, but also saving them both from their spiritual agony.
Released as part of Nikkatsu’s Roman Porno series, the film’s provocative portrayal of sex, abuse, and trauma is unsurprising but Sômai — best known for coming-of-age films like Typhoon Club (1985) and Moving (1993) — enhances the charged material with dense atmospherics and deliberate pacing, allowing himself frequent long takes which sometimes weave the erotic and dramatic into single sustained sequences, often capturing a multitude of the characters’ emotions while doing so. A scene of Nami in bed with her philandering boss segues into a relaxed kind of post-coital intimacy which wordlessly indicates just how long their entanglement has been going on. By contrast, the scene of her arriving at home after being found out — and subsequently fired — sees her going from composed to erratic, the camera capturing her doing the dishes before throwing a whiskey bottle at the wall in anger.
Love Hotel uses this approach to not only examine the conflicting feelings and desires at play in the central relationship, but also how the past lingers in the spaces the characters occupy. After Tetsuro agrees to meet Nami for a date, the two spend the day talking by the dock where he saved her from committing suicide a few scenes earlier, reflecting on their first meeting. She expresses a desire to, in a way, finish what they started — quite transparently a desperate attempt at reclaiming her lost autonomy — and Tetsuro, just as desperate as she is, hesitantly goes along, longing to be free of the guilt that has tormented him for two years.
In what might be the film’s most emotionally affecting scene, Nami is seen putting on a melancholy record — given to her by Tetsuro — pouring herself a drink, and making a desperate, heartbroken phone call to her former boss and lover. Despite him coldly cutting the conversation short, Nami goes on talking, ignoring the disconnect tone — as is customary in the world of film and television, the role of the disconnect tone is played by a dial tone — and telling her non-responsive ex about both her pain and the beautiful love she has supposedly found with Tetsuro (“He treats me like a woman.”) while sitting on the bed that she had previously shared, all alone this time.
After a spur-of-the-moment attempt at recreating their harrowing encounter falls flat, Nami and Tetsuro decide to return to Room 301 of the love hotel. What begins with awkward advances, evolves into something approximating genuine intimacy as they finally consummate their bizarre, tragic relationship, even though their tender exchange is made tense by the history that looms large in the room. Once again, the scene takes place across one continuous shot, taking the audience through the pair’s initial reticence, their eventual lovemaking, and finally — after a slow pan across the neon-colored, oni-adorned walls — them lying in bed exhausted, their bodies closely intertwined.
The hotel bed’s headboard is lined with a quadripartite mirror and after Nami falls asleep, Tetsuro catches a glimpse of himself in it, reacting with a combination of disbelief, repulsion, and horror at the face staring back at him. Seeing himself in Nami “saved” him, as he claims — an idea Nami takes to as well, especially after her life begins crumbling around her — but once he’s confronted with his actual reflection, Tetsuro disappears and his fate is left uncertain, leaving Nami to once again find herself alone in a bed she had just shared with someone.
The design of the mirror recalls the one featured prominently in Dream Crimes a.k.a. Hit Woman, another gorgeously shot — though far more formulaic — pinku eiga written by Love Hotel screenwriter Takashi Ishii and also released in 1985. Mirrors feature prominently in both films and the heavily stylized Dream Crimes takes its infatuation with them to hazy places, at one point scrambling its characters’ naked bodies in the reflection of a kaleidoscopic ceiling mirror.
But where Dream Crimes’ mirror-heavy production design fails to meaningfully connect them to its themes, they do play a central role in Love Hotel and their relevance is established early on when the film’s title card appears as a reflection in Tetsuro’s yakuza-chic sunglasses. Similarly, when he walks in on Ryoko being raped, the act is shown within the confines of a small mirror, her husband’s horrified reaction taking up most of the frame. Throughout, the mirrors reflect the things the characters would prefer to avert their eyes from, be it a sexual assault, ghosts from their past, or even themselves.
As is the case with a lot of pink films, Love Hotel is ultimately about broken, alienated people looking for connection in a society designed to deny them that. Be it Muscle’s (1989) gay lovers who take sadomasochistic devotion to violent extremes or the depraved artist-model relationship at the heart of Yasuzô Masumura’s Blind Beast (1969), quite a few pinkus (and pinku-adjacent works) are, in spite of their darkly erotic exterior, largely concerned with lives lived in the shadow of modernity. The world of Love Hotel doesn’t allow its characters an authentic existence so in search of a sense of self, they only find reprieve in each other and in the pain they share. This comfort can’t save them, but at least they get to face the void together — if only for a moment.
"I’ll be your mirror
Reflect what you are, in case you don’t know"
—The Velvet Underground
beautiful and insightful piece fred 🥲