Hotel Noir

Hotel Noir

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* Most external filmography links go to The Internet Movie Database.

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Hotel Noir (2012)

Opened: 10/12/2012 Limited

On-Demand10/09/2012
Limited10/12/2012
Cinema Village...10/12/2012 - 10/18/20127 days

Trailer: Click for trailer

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Genre: Crime Drama

Rated: Unrated

Trenchcoats. Cigarettes. Revolvers. Femme fatales.

Los Angeles, 1958: A detective holes up in a downtown hotel waiting for killers to come and get him. As one long night turns to day he meets various characters with haunted pasts of their own, and the truth is revealed of how he ended up in this predicament.

Synopsis

Downtown Los Angeles, sometime in the 1950's. Nighttime.

A detective checks into a hotel across from the train station and waits.

He knows it's simply a matter of time before the gangsters he has stolen from come find him.

He has played his hand and come up short.

He's broken his own rules.

He's as good as dead.

On his last night on earth, long past the point of caring, he meets as series of characters: a singer trying to become a better person, a salesman with a secret, a gambler with an attitude, a chambermaid full of dreams.

The past keeps crashing into the present and the future -- if such a thing ever existed -- is but a vague rumor.

This is the world of HOTEL NOIR.

Director's Statement

Trenchcoats. Cigarettes. Revolvers. Femme fatales.

What is Film Noir? It isn't a genre, not exactly. There aren't set rules as to what you can and can't do, like a horror film or a romantic comedy. It is first and foremost a state of mind: a pessimistic, shadowy style of crime picture that sprouted from the disillusioned outlook of men who had experienced the horrors of a world war and had returned to a country where women -- out of necessity -- had become more independent, which only deepened the sense of unease in the men. It is the result of ex-pat European directors working with shoestring budgets, injecting danger into familiar morality tales with codeapproved "crime-doesn't-pay" endings.

It is the marriage of pulp and existentialism. Mocked and derided by critics at the time, to me these movies resonate much more than the so-called serious pictures of the era. The delirious, fog-drenched world of staccato dialogue and sudden spasms of violence occupies the perfect sweet spot of what movies can be. The best noir films feel like when you wake up disconcerted from a strange, unnerving dream. This is a feeling a like.

In Hemingway's The Killers, a man awaits the arrival of two hitmen and puts up no resistance to what they have come here to do. Such is the guilt and sense of fatality of the endeavor. He knows he screwed up and he is tired of running. Both the classic 1946 Robert Siodmak film starring Ava Gardner and Burt Lancaster and the brutal, garish 1964 Don Siegel remake (starring that impossible dream of pop/historical figures: Lee Marvin, John Cassavettes, Ronald Reagan and Angie) capture this perfectly.

This too, is the starting point of Hotel Noir. One night in the late 1950's, a detective named Felix arrives at a hotel having already given up. He has broken the rules -- his own rules -- and lost. The gig is up. All that is left for him to do now is wait. It is in that night of waiting that the action unfolds -- as he interacts with a group of characters who spin their own tales and in turn exact from him a sort of confession. In the deterministic universe of noir, it doesn't matter how well you play the game, because it is rigged from the start. You can be a man of honor, but step out of line just that one time -- convincing yourself, lying to yourself that this is but a temporary state of mind before normalcy returns -- and your fate is sealed. What the character believes to be the beginning of a new chapter in their life usually spells only the beginning of the end.

This is a world in which the past always haunts you, the present is a labyrinthine nightmare and there is no future.

 

Trailer