New Rose HotelTo weaponize love might be the gravest sin of all. New Rose Hotel is a sci-fi crime movie adapted by Abel Ferrara from the short story of the same name by William Gibson. It deals with a pair of freelance industrial spies--Fox (Christopher Walken) and "X" (Willem Dafoe)--who take a $100 million dollar commission to lure a genius researcher named Hiroshi (Yoshitaka Amano) away from his work at a mega-corporation called "Maas". Their plan is to entice Hiroshi with a "honeypot" trap through a prostitute named Sandii (Asia Argento). The only problem: X has fallen in love with Sandii.
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The Nineties were a strange period for filmmaking, what with the increased access to simpler, low-res digital cameras. Some filmmakers--like Ferrara here--took advantage of the raw and rough aesthetic, seeing this as a way to underscore the grime and squalor of the movie's subject matter. Technical and budget limitations aside, this is what I believe was a motivating factor for the rough look of New Rose Hotel. Ferrara's films often embrace the sour and unsavory underbelly of urban corruption, and his eye for this fits surprisingly well with Gibson's stories, replete with corporate double-dealing and rampant, amoral illegality. But while stories of corporate espionage and duplicity are great, Ferrara's take on this story is wildly experimental. The key thing to keep in mind about New Rose Hotel is not that it is a "masterpiece" (in the traditional sense of the word as it is oft applied to cinema), but an expression meant to evoke a specific kind of mood or convey a subtext. It is akin to street poetry, and is imbued with a virile excessiveness and a cynical edge that is larger than life. It wouldn't be unreasonable to describe the film more as postmodern "art" than a true feature film. It's intriguing to consider whether the rough edges on New Rose Hotel are deliberate or not. For example, there are numerous instances where the dubbed audio doesn't synch with the actors' lips, such as when Fox and X are in a restaurant, and the reflection of Fox clearly doesn't gel with what he's saying. But...was this really an oversight, or is it indicative of an experience that is more interested in reveling in its true identity as a seedy, low-budget erotic thriller than pretending to be something else. And yet, incongruously, Ferrara's direction also favors ephemeral and even dreamy scenes that feel blurred by a heightened sense of reality...or maybe it's just representing that the characters may (at times) be under the effects of one or more drugs. (Maybe it's both.) This hits us from the start as X maneuvers through the streets of Shinjuku while...something is happening on the streets. Just what? Who knows. It's not so much meant to speak to the plot as the mood of the story, and of the jumbled, easily warped perspective of our protagonist, X.
The casting of New Rose Hotel is worth discussion, with acclaimed graphic artist Yoshitaka Amano (yes, that Yoshitaka Amano)--whose character designs helped to define such phenomenal fantasy series as "Final Fantasy" and "Vampire Hunter D"--cast as Hiroshi. Yet Amano has absolutely no speaking lines, and is seen in exclusively in grainy footage meant to resemble surveillance feeds that must have been shot for the sake of this movie. (They also feature actress Gretchen Mol as his icy wife, who also has no speaking lines.) Why such a specific and yet head-scratching casting choice by Ferrara? Aside from "why not?", it speaks to a kind of name recognition that reflects the perceived saturation of Japanese culture in the West around this time--already a popular trope in Gibson's work. Here, it seems to presage the kind of pop celebrity ubiquitousness--the kind that has already overtaken the internet and TV--where pop icons aren't shoehorned into one genre exclusively, but seek to spread their brand across the world itself. That's not exactly what's happening in New Rose Hotel, but the dissolution of nations and borders, of morals, of taboos...all of these are qualities that emerge in Gibson's works, and feel right at home in the kind of urban detritus of a world that's "fifteen minutes into the future"...and just how little it truly differs from our own. New Rose Hotel bounces back and forth between paranoid espionage--where betrayal is just a bigger paycheck away--and quieter, more natural moments of dialogue between the main characters. The best example of this comes after Sandii has already succeeded in seducing Hiroshi, yet X is conflicted because of his affection to this beautiful woman. Both are in bed together, seeing each other in secret in Berlin, and X asks a question of Sandii that is loaded with coarse language and jealousy. It's immediately evident that he is trying to hurt her, but only because he has allowed himself to be hurt by encouraging her into seducing Hiroshi for profit. She understands this, and their conversation is very carefully scripted and blocked. The interplay between Dafoe and Argento is so deft and nuanced that it belongs alongside the best depictions of a relationship in crisis, such as those seen in Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage. In a sense, New Rose Hotel is a movie that is torn between two identities--not unlike Sandii, who is put in the role of a seductress by the compelling proposition made by Fox. The film is a great showcase for Ferrara regulars (Walken and Dafoe) to represent their range and ease, and their scenes together feel ripe with dialogue that would feel even more at home in a theatrical production. The only problem is that with Argento's charisma, I feel that the film would have benefited far more if we had the opportunity to see her seduction of Hiroshi first-hand, rather than have it handled entirely off-screen. Additionally, there is an altogether too obvious staged quality to moments like the street scenes in Marrakech which feels like it was shot on a backlot. Despite the overtly low production values, other incongruous scenes with boiler plate dialogue (like when X recruits some thugs to escort Hiroshi to Morocco) reduces the story into little more than a mere sequence of confusing events that are left adrift, orbiting around the more interesting relationships between Fox, X, and Sandii. But the low-budget vibe of New Rose Hotel is an inexorable part of its identity, which still managed to make for a novel experience for cinephiles who are down with slumming it once in a while.
Recommended for: Fans of a rough (yet intriguing) adaptation of a near-future dystopia, where corporations run amok and big money can be had by exploiting the system. (Wait..."near"-future?) One's enjoyment of New Rose Hotel will have a lot to do with having an appreciation for actors getting to stretch out and explore their respective ranges and from the enjoyment of an experimental and unorthodox hodge-podge of film formats and convoluted story threads, not often found in more polished films.
The casting of New Rose Hotel is worth discussion, with acclaimed graphic artist Yoshitaka Amano (yes, that Yoshitaka Amano)--whose character designs helped to define such phenomenal fantasy series as "Final Fantasy" and "Vampire Hunter D"--cast as Hiroshi. Yet Amano has absolutely no speaking lines, and is seen in exclusively in grainy footage meant to resemble surveillance feeds that must have been shot for the sake of this movie. (They also feature actress Gretchen Mol as his icy wife, who also has no speaking lines.) Why such a specific and yet head-scratching casting choice by Ferrara? Aside from "why not?", it speaks to a kind of name recognition that reflects the perceived saturation of Japanese culture in the West around this time--already a popular trope in Gibson's work. Here, it seems to presage the kind of pop celebrity ubiquitousness--the kind that has already overtaken the internet and TV--where pop icons aren't shoehorned into one genre exclusively, but seek to spread their brand across the world itself. That's not exactly what's happening in New Rose Hotel, but the dissolution of nations and borders, of morals, of taboos...all of these are qualities that emerge in Gibson's works, and feel right at home in the kind of urban detritus of a world that's "fifteen minutes into the future"...and just how little it truly differs from our own. New Rose Hotel bounces back and forth between paranoid espionage--where betrayal is just a bigger paycheck away--and quieter, more natural moments of dialogue between the main characters. The best example of this comes after Sandii has already succeeded in seducing Hiroshi, yet X is conflicted because of his affection to this beautiful woman. Both are in bed together, seeing each other in secret in Berlin, and X asks a question of Sandii that is loaded with coarse language and jealousy. It's immediately evident that he is trying to hurt her, but only because he has allowed himself to be hurt by encouraging her into seducing Hiroshi for profit. She understands this, and their conversation is very carefully scripted and blocked. The interplay between Dafoe and Argento is so deft and nuanced that it belongs alongside the best depictions of a relationship in crisis, such as those seen in Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage. In a sense, New Rose Hotel is a movie that is torn between two identities--not unlike Sandii, who is put in the role of a seductress by the compelling proposition made by Fox. The film is a great showcase for Ferrara regulars (Walken and Dafoe) to represent their range and ease, and their scenes together feel ripe with dialogue that would feel even more at home in a theatrical production. The only problem is that with Argento's charisma, I feel that the film would have benefited far more if we had the opportunity to see her seduction of Hiroshi first-hand, rather than have it handled entirely off-screen. Additionally, there is an altogether too obvious staged quality to moments like the street scenes in Marrakech which feels like it was shot on a backlot. Despite the overtly low production values, other incongruous scenes with boiler plate dialogue (like when X recruits some thugs to escort Hiroshi to Morocco) reduces the story into little more than a mere sequence of confusing events that are left adrift, orbiting around the more interesting relationships between Fox, X, and Sandii. But the low-budget vibe of New Rose Hotel is an inexorable part of its identity, which still managed to make for a novel experience for cinephiles who are down with slumming it once in a while.
Recommended for: Fans of a rough (yet intriguing) adaptation of a near-future dystopia, where corporations run amok and big money can be had by exploiting the system. (Wait..."near"-future?) One's enjoyment of New Rose Hotel will have a lot to do with having an appreciation for actors getting to stretch out and explore their respective ranges and from the enjoyment of an experimental and unorthodox hodge-podge of film formats and convoluted story threads, not often found in more polished films.