Love Hotel

As Japan moves towards a more conservative stance, the survival of its 37,000 love hotels – overnight lodging where guests can indulge in sexual fantasies outside of their restrictive jobs and personal lives – is more uncertain, making Philip Cox and Hikaru Toda’s film a time capsule of a once-permissive business a thing of the past. The characters in Love Hotel include single men, pensioners, a dominatrix, heterosexual and gay couples, and staff of Osaka’s Angel Love Hotel, with most allowing the camera to hover close by and capture the guests’ efforts to rekindle, explore, open up, or just discuss issues and strengthen relationships. The undercurrent of governmental incursions – tit-for-tat rules designed to legally rob the hotels of their essential purpose – start to emerge in the final third, but the directors chose to avoid examining the reasons for governmental crackdowns and cultural shift. What saves the film is the refreshing presentation of private sexual escapes without being sleazy, voyeuristic, and exploitative.