You might think there can be little in common between two of Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz’s most recent films. Despite their utterly different settings, both films are shot through with an almost exhausting tension as we wait for the repercussions of high-risk decisions to emerge.
One of the films is 2023’s Firebrand, which is set in green and verdant England and follows Katherine Parr (Alicia Vikander) as she rebels against a dangerous and gangrenous Henry VIII (Jude Law). The other is this unflinchingly seedy thriller set under a bleaching Brazilian sun.
The freewheeling plot follows Heraldo (Iago Xavier), a reluctant, low-rent gangster who is in hiding after botching a hit job.
Things may have been different had he turned up to help his brother carry out the murder. But the night before he met a woman at a beach dive, danced the samba and took her to the motel of the film’s title. After a night of sex and sleep in one of the establishment’s lurid cell-like rooms he wakes to find the woman and his money gone. Worse, he later finds that his brother was killed in an attempt to carry out the hit on his own.
Now wanted by the gangster who he let down, he persuades the remarkably relaxed married owners of the motel to take him in with promises that he will work as a handyman in exchange for board.
The motel is a knocking shop for any couple, trio or quartet who need a room fast. Director Aïnouz goes to great lengths to ensure that sex between humans in his film is no more artfully shot than that between the donkeys in the motel’s dusty, sun-baked yard. Everything that is alive is rutting here. The motel’s corridor echoes to punters’ grunts and cries.
It is a relentless and often graphic account of this underbelly. But like the Coen brothers’ first hit Blood Simple, what grips is the sense of events being driven by fallible human nature. As sordid as it is satisfying.
Film: Motel Destino
★★★★
