For
filmmakers, the advantages of living through a real-life dystopia include the
highly cinematic locations the regimes leave behind. Of course, for Dan Pita,
there was no up-side when he was banned from filmmaking, because his 1983 film Sand
Cliffs sufficiently perturbed Ceausescu. About a decade later, he filmed this
weird surreal dystopian parable in the dictator’s former palace (now the
parliament building). Once again, a sinister and capricious “boss” rules over the
exploited workers in Pita’s Luxury Hotel, which screens during Film
Forum’s new retrospective, The Romanians:30 Years of Cinema Revolution.
Alex
is an earnest plugger, who thinks he has arrived when he is appointed manager
of the Hotel’s flagship restaurant, but as soon as he tries to make
improvements, the “boss” slaps him down. Of course, that suits his chief rival
and most of the wait staff just fine. Even though he is popular with the patrons
(who could well be the surviving ruling class in this ambiguous dystopia), Alex
is soon transferred to the Hotel’s warehouse. However, Alex is a restaurant
manager at heart. He will petition the Boss and generally drive his former
employees to distraction in his efforts to regain his position.
Meanwhile,
there are hints of a civil war going on outside and perhaps even inside the
hotel. There could very well be a power struggle going on. We never get a good
look at the Boss, but he might be a succession of figureheads, somewhat like
Number 2 in The Prisoner. Yet, nobody seems to be aware of any of these
wider conflicts, except Marta, the privileged femme fatale who makes no secret
of her interest in Alex.
The
world of Luxury Hotel shares common elements with Late August at the Hotel Ozone and Snowpiercer, but it is superior to both of those
films. Frankly, its vision of class conflict within the paranoid surveillance
state is not particularly ground-breaking, but the visuals are quite striking.
The decaying but still ostentatious palace is indeed quite a sight to behold,
which Pita and his cinematographer, Calin Ghibu, fully capitalize on. You truly
couldn’t create sets like this.
Valentin
Popescu is weirdly intense and standoffish as Alex. He is the sort of guileless,
politically tone-deaf naïf that fare poorly in police states. His anger
management issues do not help either. However, Stefan Iordache largely upstages
and out-shines him as his Machiavellian nemesis. He is a great villain, but Lamia
Beligan also plays Marta as quite the sultry wild card.
Luxury
Hotel could
have probably only been produced during the immediate post-Ceausescu aftermath,
when the palace was available, in all its faded grandeur. It is definitely
spectacle, but serious, distinctively pointed spectacle. Highly recommended for
fans of dystopian social satire, Luxury Hotel screens tomorrow (11/16)
and Thursday (11/21), as part of the Romanians
series, now underway at Film Forum.
