Reviewed on May 23rd at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival – In Competition Section. 115 Mins
Cast: Iago Xavier, Nataly Rocha, Fábio Assunção
Genre: Drama, Thriller
Director: Karim Aïnouz
In Irish Cinemas: Now
Much like Luchino Visconti’s erotically charged debut Ossessione (1943), Motel Destino can be read as a sultry, freewheeling reinterpretation of James M. Cain’s noir classic The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934). Director Karim Aïnouz transposes the themes of desire, betrayal, and entrapment to the northeastern Brazilian state of Ceará—his birthplace—where the sultry equatorial landscape becomes a vital narrative force. Collaborating with cinematographer Hélène Louvart (Pina, Rocks, La chimaera), Aïnouz paints a world where the sun scorches the earth and the breeze barely tempers the oppressive heat. The shore shimmers with sensual energy: waves break over stone-speckled sand, palm trees twitch under the wind, and bodies—sweaty, half-dressed, bronzed—move with restless, instinctual grace.
On the eve of his departure for São Paulo, the film’s protagonist, Heraldo (Iago Xavier), frolics in the crystalline sea with his older brother Jorge (Renan Capivara), in a moment that exudes undeniable homoeroticism. Aïnouz’s personal history informs the scene: a queer filmmaker who left Brazil’s homophobia behind to find freedom in the early ’90s New York scene, he was a formative figure in New Queer Cinema. His first feature, Madame Satã (2002), premiered at Cannes to controversy over its bold depictions of queer identity and sex. While many of his subsequent films centred complex female protagonists—leading to his reputation as a maker of “women’s pictures”—Motel Destino merges these threads into a bold, stylised, and emotionally volatile Latin American melodrama-slash-sexual thriller, steeped in his love for European auteurs. The ghosts of Fassbinder and Pasolini haunt the frame, especially the former: the film recalls the heightened stylisation and saturated visuals of Querelle (1982), adapted from Jean Genet, as well as the bruised outsider eroticism of Fear Eats the Soul (1974). Heraldo, like Fassbinder’s Ali, is fetishised for his youth and racialised body, navigating a world where power, desire, and violence are entangled.
The titular motel, where Heraldo takes refuge after a tragedy and a violent encounter with a drug gang, operates as both a haven and a trap. Presided over by the formidable matriarch Bambina (Fabiola Liper), the gang seeks vengeance, pushing Heraldo into hiding. The motel’s owners take him in: Elias (Fábio Assunção), a grizzled patriarch of uncertain sexual orientation; his wife Dayana (Nataly Rocha), who quietly yearns for liberation; and their nocturnal porter, Môco (Yuri Yamamoto). Together, they form a fragile, desire-fueled surrogate family. As Heraldo assumes the role of handyman, his suppressed traumas surface, including the raw anger he carries from a fatherless upbringing. A charged Oedipal triangle begins to take shape, bristling with tension, longing, and the threat of betrayal. The question looming over this finely acted ensemble: who will survive when passion collides with resentment?
Marcos Pedroso’s lush art direction transforms the motel into a fever dream—part roadside refuge, part Genetian prison. Echoes of Un chant d’amour (1950) reverberate throughout: a voyeuristic architecture of corridors and peepholes, rooms saturated in neon, each a capsule of forbidden lust. Sound designer Waldir Xavier’s textured soundscape constantly undercut signs that command’ SILENCIO’: gasps, sighs, and the rhythmic cadences of sex. “You hardly ever hear a man moaning,” Elias remarks, before stalking the halls to investigate—a moment that lays bare his voyeuristic impulses. The film’s sonic sensuality is further enhanced by composer Amine Bouhafa’s score, which channels the haunting melancholy of Ry Cooder’s Paris, Texas (1984) before giving way to a kaleidoscopic rave crescendo in the film’s unforgettable closing sequence.
Woven into the motel’s surreal ecosystem is a menagerie of animals—stray cats, goats, copulating donkeys, and a coiled cobra discovered in a bathtub. These uncanny creatures bring a magical realist touch that evokes the midnight movie surrealism of Alejandro Jodorowsky and David Lynch. Heraldo, increasingly haunted by visions of Bambina’s gang, seems trapped in a nightmare. Yet even amid the violence and decay, the film gestures toward redemption. In a final act of grace, the lovers, having dug their symbolic graves, escape civilisation stripped bare, like Dorothy Vallens in Blue Velvet (1986). A white horse, spectral and miraculous, appears on the highway: an omen, a benediction.
The film’s visual language also marks these juxtapositions between realism and myth, brutality and tenderness. Home movie textures mark Heraldo’s wistful memories, contrasting the hyper-saturated motel scenes. Colourist Dirk Meier, an often-unsung tone artisan, excels here, capturing emotional nuance through palette and grain.
Motel Destino shares aesthetic and conceptual DNA with the works of Alice Rohrwacher, Claire Denis, and Gaspar Noé—filmmakers with whom Aïnouz also shares crew members, including editor Nelly Quettier. Premiering in Competition at Cannes 2024 alongside Sean Baker’s Anora, Aïnouz’s film makes a compelling case for the vitality of cinema as a site of transgression and tenderness. In an imagined repertory cinema program, Motel Destino and Anora might sit side by side: two electrifying visions of pleasure palaces where desire and violence intertwine and fleeting, neon-lit beauty shimmers through the cracks of a brutal world.
Overall: 6.5/10
Movie Reviewer
