The Hotel
旅馆
Hong Kong, 2022, b&w, 1.33:1, 104 mins.
Director: Wang Xiaoshuai 王小帅.
Rating: 5/10.
Sleekly-shot chamber drama about characters stranded in a hotel during the Covid pandemic is undercut by a script that too often feels manufactured.
STORY
A hotel in Chiang Mai, northern Thailand, Apr 2020. A young woman from Beijing, Liang Suwa, aka Sova (Yuan Ningning), who’s about to turn 20, is asleep in her room. She wakes up, dresses, explores the hotel, and goes to the roof. Chapter Two 章回贰. News about the Covid-19 pandemic is spreading quickly. By the hotel pool Sova meets Yu Feng (Ye Fu), a middle-aged professor from Wuhan, China, who’s married and often comes to Chiang Mai. They meet on other occasions and she’s flirty with him; but he doesn’t respond. His naggy wife, Mei Hongyu (Huang Xiaolei), is always saying he’s no longer interested in her. She poses for an artist, Tommy (Li Zonghan), who’s desperate to get on a flight home if he can find one. One night Mei Hongyu has a massive row with Yu Feng. Chapter Three 章回叁. By the pool a Thai Chinese masseur, Pop, aka Ding (Worrapon Srisai), 26, is giving his blind, middle-aged Chinese client Ding (Dai Jun) a head massage. Sova flirts with Dong in the pool and guesses the two men, who are sharing a room, are maybe lovers. Later she asks Dong if he or Ding is gay and he says he doesn’t know. She asks if she can kiss him, just once, and he lets her. Chapter One 章回壹. The same morning on which Sova wakes up and explores the hotel. Her mother, Liang Dan (Qu Ying), who has brought her to Chiang Mai especially to mark her 20th birthday, comes to her room for a talk. She is wearing a mask as she is paranoid about catching Covid-19. She perpetually nags Sova, who reminds her mother that she’d promised to tell her something important when she was 15 but still hasn’t. THE HOTEL 旅馆. Mei Hongyu floats face down in the pool in order to attract her husband’s attention. Thinking she’s drowned, Tommy tries to rescue her but gets shouted at. Mei Hongyu tells Yu Feng she thinks she has Covid-19 and finally agrees to him taking her to hospital for a check-up. Next evening Ding confronts Dong over his friendship with Sova and later tries to seduce him. Dong rejects his advances and wakes up next morning to find Ding gone. While Mei Hongyu is in hospital, Sova drunkenly seduces Yu Feng one night in a corridor. Next morning Mei Hongyu returns to the hotel and bumps into Tommy, who’s found a flight to Chengdu. She decides to go with him but can’t find Yu Feng in their room, so leaves him a message. Sova returns to her room, still wasted, and is confronted by her mother over where she’s been all night. The pair eventually make up and Liang Dan finally tells Sova her family secret. Later, Yu Feng attends a tiny birthday celebration for Sova to which he’s been invited by Liang Dan. More surprises ensue.
REVIEW
How to follow your masterwork to date, a three-hour saga of two families’ shared tragedy and denial set across 30 years of Mainland history? So Long, My Son 地久天长 (2019) had crowned a gradual career renaissance by Mainland director Wang Xiaoshuai 王小帅 that had begun with Chongqing Blues 日照重庆 (2010) and continued with 11 Flowers 我11 (2011) and Red Amnesia 闯入者 (2014), in which he had explored larger themes, such as historical guilt, than in his earlier works like So Close to Paradise 扁担•姑娘 (1998), Beijing Bicycle 十七岁的单车 (2001) and Shanghai Dreams 青红 (2005). In the event, chance solved Wang’s problem: stranded by the Covid-19 pandemic in a hotel in Chiang Mai, Thailand, where he and a group of friends had gone to celebrate CNY 2020, they all decided to make a film about a group of friends stranded by the Covid-19 pandemic in a hotel in Chiang Mai. Hastily written, played by the friends themselves, and shot in b&w over 14 days with whatever Thai crew they could get at short notice, it emerged some two years later as The Hotel 旅馆, flying a Hong Kong production flag. It has yet to be shown outside festivals, let alone in Mainland cinemas.
It seems an almost improbable coincidence that the necessary talent to make a movie was stranded with Wang, then 53, in a hotel in northern Thailand during the start of the pandemic: Wang’s second wife, film-maker Liu Xuan 刘璇; veteran producer/director Zhang Yuan 张元, his writer ex-wife Ning Dai 宁岱 and their actress daughter Ning Yuanyuan 宁元元; novelist-essayist-scriptwriter (Love in the 1980s 1980年代的爱情, 2015) Ye Fu 野夫 (pen name of Zheng Shiping 郑世平); actresses Qu Ying 瞿颖 and Huang Xiaolei 黄小蕾; and singer-presenter-actor Dai Jun 戴军. Whatever the case, The Hotel is a technically smooth chamber piece that’s generally well acted, somewhat iffily written, and quite a platform for Ning Yuanyuan, then just turned 22 and in only her second film after a leading role, at the age of seven, in her father’s Little Red Flowers 看上去很美 (2006).
All the action takes place inside the hotel or by the pool, with the exterior of the building never seen and the town of Chiang Mai only briefly glimpsed from the roof. In practice, the movie could have been shot anytime, anywhere, as there is nothing visible to tie it to the time of the pandemic except for remarks by the characters. The hotel’s other guests and staff are never seen. Ning is the first and last face to be shown on screen, and her character of the flirty 19-year-old who’s determined to live her own life (as well as lose her virginity) dominates the film and sets in motion the various mini-stories: teasing and finally seducing a middle-aged professor (stonily played by co-writer Ye Fu) whose long marriage to a former student (Huang Xiaolei) is crumbling; teasing but not seducing a maybe-gay Thai-Chinese masseur (Worrapon Srisai), whose blind middle-aged client (Dai Jun) is in love with him; and perpetually arguing with her naggy mother (Qu Ying), who’s brought her there for her 20th birthday to reveal a family secret.
The screenplay by Ning Dai and Ye Fu is very up-and-down and often feels manufactured, a long way from the observational style of Ning’s movies for Zhang (Seventeen Years 过年回家, 1999; Little Red Flowers) and for her younger sister Ning Ying 宁瀛 (For Fun 找乐, 1993; I Love Beijing 夏日暖洋洋, 2001; To Live and Die in Ordos 警察日记, 2013). The gay relationship between the young masseur and his older blind client feels especially phoney, there just to give the film some arty traction. Elsewhere it’s the performers who give the dialogue some depth, especially Huang as the prof’s naggy wife who delivers a notable monologue (shot in a single take) while in bed.
As the young catalyst of events, Ning Yuanyuan is no great actress but quite a screen presence: she fits the bill as a mercurial Gen-00er who’s obsessed with herself and, equally important for the movie, looks great in a swimsuit and long dress. As the mother, Qu often seems stuck in a half-comic role, masked up against the pandemic, though the two women’s later scenes are more quietly played. The main problem with the film is that the characters just aren’t that involving, and the actors get few chances from the script to really engage the audience. And though the main twist is neatly enough staged, it hardly comes as a surprise.
The most memorable thing about The Hotel is the coolly clinical b&w photography by Thai d.p. Suparawee Patravanich, in his first feature-length outing. Shooting in Academy ratio (1.33:1 or 4:3), Patravanich underlines the film’s chamber-like approach and the fact that the characters are hemmed in, with nowhere to go. (The sleek visuals have none of the raw quality that Wang’s only other film in b&w, his debut The Days 冬春的日子 [1994], had.) The mostly fixed camerawork is far more meaningful than the arty tricks that Wang uses, such as dividing the film into pointless chapters and mis-ordering Chapter One, as well as having the main title appear only halfway through. The Chinese used for the chapter marks also has a formal flavour.
For the record, all the written Chinese in the film is in traditional characters, befitting a production that is technically a Hong Kong one. Zhang Yuan and Liu Xuan are credited as producers.
CREDITS
Produced by Hong Kong General Film (HK), Front Films (HK).
Script: Ning Dai, Ye Fu [Zheng Shiping]. Photography: Suparawee Patravanich. Editing: Lee Chatametikool. Music: none. Art direction: uncredited. Styling: uncredited. Sound: Tariq Marzbaan, Fu Kang.
Cast: Ning Yuanyuan (Liang Suwa/Sova), Ye Fu [Zheng Shiping] (Yu Feng, professor), Qu Ying (Liang Dan, Sova’s mother), Huang Xiaolei (Mei Hongyu, Yu Feng’s wife), Worrapon Srisai [Li Yingqian] (Dong/Pop, masseur), Li Zonghan (Tommy, artist), Dai Jun (Ding, Dong’s client).
Premiere: Toronto Film Festival (Contemporary World Cinema), 9 Sep 2022.
Release: Hong Kong, tba.