Love Hotel (2014 documentary)
Love Hotel（2014・ドキュメンタリー）
Storyline
The whole story, ending included.
Two and a half years inside an Osaka love hotel as a new government's rules threaten it — strangers' intimacies, a dominatrix, a gay couple.
Love Hotel is a documentary by the British film-maker Philip Cox and the Japanese film-maker Hikaru Toda, a British and French co-production by Native Voice Films and Bonne Pioche. It premiered at the Hot Docs festival in Toronto in April 2014 and was shown in BBC Four's Storyville strand in February 2015. With no funding, the two went to Osaka, where Toda says people are more open about their private lives, and knocked on love-hotel doors until one, the Angelo, let them in. They filmed there over two and a half years, often waiting for hours behind the camera, in what has been called the first full documentary shot inside a Japanese love hotel.
The Angelo is a place of themed rooms, waterbeds, bondage ropes and latex, and its guests become a set of portraits. Mr Yamada, a 71-year-old widower, comes alone, watches pornographic films and thinks back over his life. Yuki, a young office worker, meets a married lover. Kazu and Fumi, two gay lawyers under pressure to keep their relationship secret, can be together freely here. A couple in their forties try role play to rekindle their passion. Two divorcees in their sixties rent a room every week to dance together. A lonely businessman pays a dominatrix to meet needs he cannot bring to his wife. A few scenes show sex explicitly.
Behind the scenes the camera follows the manager and staff. After a conservative government is elected in 2012, strict new rules on love hotels threaten the Angelo's future, and the film ends with staff cuts and a refurbishment.
Starring
Mr YamadaHimself
A 71-year-old widower who comes to the hotel alone, watches pornographic films and reflects ruefully on his past.
YukiHerself
A young office worker who uses the hotel for an affair with a married man.
Kazu and FumiThemselves
Two gay lawyers under pressure to keep their relationship secret, for whom the hotel is a place to be together freely.
Why it matters
Love Hotel takes one of Japan's most familiar and least discussed institutions and asks what it is for. Its answer, drawn from the people who use it, is privacy: a room where a couple can try to rekindle something, where two men who cannot be a couple in public can simply be together, where a widower can be alone with his memories and two divorcees can dance. Toda has called it a film about a collective society in which individual desire has little room; Cox, about the need every industrial society has for fantasy and play. Filmed as a new government tightened the rules on such hotels, it shows how easily a space built for intimacy can be treated as something shameful, and it leaves open whether the privacy these rooms sell is a refuge, or a sign of how little privacy there is anywhere else.