As motel names go, it’s certainly more portentous than “Bates”. But destiny of a sort, shaped by class and money and family abuse, is waiting for the hero and heroine of this movie. This is an erotic noir thriller from Karim Aïnouz; a noir lit mostly by bright sunshine, shot with garish glee by Hélène Louvart. It takes place in a brutally functional love motel near the beach in the north-eastern Brazilian state of Ceará; this is a place from which the couple are fated to be expelled naked, like Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.
Motel Destino is co-written by Wislan Esmeraldo and Mauricio Zacharias and directed by Aïnouz who had a film in the Cannes competition just last year, an atypically florid historical costume drama called Firebrand, with Jude Law as the fleshily hindquartered Henry VIII. This is a leaner, meaner movie and Aïnouz is more engaged. Heraldo, played by Iago Xavier, is a young guy employed by a drug-dealing mob matriarch along with his brother, who is trying to dissuade him from his plans to leave the neighbourhood and try his luck in Sāo Paulo.
The brothers’ latest job is to collect an unpaid debt from a European businessman, but Heraldo absents himself from his task to take a young woman he’s just met for an evening of intimacy at Motel Destino, a place where the noise of sexual ecstasy is to be heard continuously through the walls, like the moaning of lost souls in purgatory, and where the bill has to be paid through a nasty hatch in each room. When Heraldo finally gets back to his employer’s villa there is carnage and chaos. With terrible certainty, Heraldo realises that his boss is going to believe that his absence from this scene of violence was suspiciously convenient and no accident, that it’s something to do with his plans to go to São Paulo and he must somehow be in league with the businessman.
Heraldo has to go into hiding, and the only place is within the creepily enclosed gated community of Motel Destino itself, where no customer stays long and no one asks questions. Heraldo begs for sanctuary and is reluctantly allowed in – in return for doing odd jobs and because he is pretty obviously found sexually attractive, by both the manager Elias (Fábio Assunção) and his wife Dayana (Nataly Rocha). And it is with Dayana that Heraldo begins a passionate affair, made more dangerous and more poignant by the fact that the older Dayana represents a gentleness and tenderness that Heraldo has never known. The fact that Dayana has been abused by Elias is the igniting factor.
The motel itself is deeply strange. Heraldo has to join in with the grim task of changing the rooms every day, dealing with the soiled sheets and replacing the sex toys. And he also has to deal with the boozy and leering attentions of Elias, one of whose eccentricities is that he keeps two donkeys on the property, donkeys that we see mating, a fiercely unsentimental commentary on the sex that we see happening all about. Elias likes to watch his guests: part prison guard, part voyeur.
This film is terrifically acted by its central trio: three intensely and unselfconsciously physical performances in which their bodies are frequently on show, sensual but fragile.
• Motel Destino screened at the Cannes film festival.
