 |
| Nataly Rocha and Iago Xavier in Motel Destino |
Karim Aïnouz's Motel Destino borrows from The Postman Always Rings Twice (Tay Garnett, 1946; Bob Rafelson, 1981) and gives it Brazilian color and rhythm. Heraldo (Iago Xavier) wakes up locked in a room in a sex hotel where he has spent the night with a woman he met in a bar to find that he's been robbed. He bargains with Dayana (Nataly Rocha), who runs the Motel Destino with her husband, Elias (Fábio Assunção), to let him out, leaving his identification card with the promise that he'll return to pay for the room. He's already deep in trouble: The delay in getting sprung from the room means that he's missed a crucial assignment by his gangster boss, a woman known as Bambina (Fabiola Liper), in the course of which Heraldo's brother, Jorge (Renan Capivara), has been killed. Desperate to escape the wrath of Bambina, Heraldo returns to the Motel Destino, where he arranges with Dayana to hide out. He winds up being employed by Elias, who takes a fancy to the young man. Dayana takes a bit more than a fancy, and before long she and Heraldo begin to plot a way to escape from Elias's control. The lurid setting, in which we hear the motel's clientele rather than see them, gives the film a sweaty intensity, and the three principal actors are up to the demands the script makes on them. Hélène Louvart's near-hallucinatory use of color turns this neo-noir into a neon noir.
