LOVE HOTEL
Price: $395.00 Code: 2712 |
Directed by by Shinji Somai
1985, 88 minutes
A tale of two broken souls. A call-girl named Yumi, "night-blooming flower," and Tetsuro, a married man with a debt to the yakuza, have a violent rendezvous in a cheap love hotel. Years later, haunted by the memory of that night, they reconnect and begin a strange love affair. Determined to finish what they started, they return to the scene of their first macabre passion. With a taste for wicked absurdity while coursing with undercurrents of operatic emotion, at times verging on a musical, Love Hotel is moved by the irrational forces that attract two bodies together. It's a film with a uniquely materialist sense of eros manifested in Shinji Somai's long takes, each shot a tightrope-like predicament flushed with earthly tension and live-wire physicality. Made in the same year as Typhoon Club, this elegiac erotica is one of Somai's most bewitching and unnervingly romantic works, the high-water mark of Nikkatsu Studio's legendary Roman Porno cycle of films.
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