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Hotel des Ameriques
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| Year: |
1981
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Director: |
André Téchiné
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| Stars: |
Catherine Deneuve, Patrick Dewaere, Etienne Chicot, Sabine Haudepin, Dominque Lavanant, Josiane Balasko, François Perrot, Jean-Louis Vitrac, Frédérique Ruchaud, Michèle Ban de Loménie, Pascal Bernuchon, Catherine Carrée, Gérard Deleris
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| Genre: |
Drama, Romance |
| Rating: |
  5 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
Hélène (Catherine Deneuve) is driving at some speed through the narrow streets of Biarritz in the middle of the night when she nearly runs over a pedestrian who was trying to cross the road. She stops and apologises; he is all right, but they need to file an insurance report so retire to a café she knows well where the man introduces himself as Gilles (Patrick Dewaere) and makes it clear he only wanted to fill in the report so he could talk to the very attractive Hélène longer, and possibly get to know her better. She seems wary, but when she falls asleep at the table and he spends the rest of the night looking over her, on waking she finds herself warming to him, but she has a troubled past that may be an issue.
Director Andre Téchiné had just enjoyed an international hit with his biopic of the Bronte Sisters so the world's film buffs were looking forward to seeing what he would conjure up next, which turned out to be this relationship drama starring Catherine Deneuve, an iconic French actress who would go on to appear in plenty of his later works right into the twenty-first century. However, whether she was seen to her best advantage in this was a different matter when it was a story, like its characters, that never settled, played out in a series of short, sharp scenes whose brief durations should by all rights have made the experience fly by yet somehow with a lack of momentum managed to drag noticeably.
Character and personality were what interested Téchiné, watching them interact, but you had the impression he was garnering more amusement from placing these individuals together in their almost but not quite connections than we would by actually watching these thwarted lives unfold. Gilles thinks he has made quite a success by wooing Hélène, but she keeps pulling away, probably because her heart belongs to someone else, so when she takes him out to a house in the countryside to reveal all, it looks as if this is about to turn into a thriller where Gilles breathes his last thanks to her intervention. But no, this old place was the home she shared with her deceased husband, an architect who had big plans for designing an entire city.
When that didn't happen (more thwarting, do you detect a theme?) he killed himself by drowning in the sea, making the British cinema's take on its nation's coastal resorts look positively exuberant in comparison. You could understand the scepticism in the off season, but positioning Biarritz as a hell on Earth for its locals was another potentially fruitful line Téchiné failed to capitalise upon, he was more captivated by setting up these lonely people, some of them quite objectionable, and having us feel their frustrations to the extent that the entire film was an exercise in growing irritation, or at least dissatisfaction. You could take succour in a work that depicted the famed nation of great lovers as rubbish at romance as the rest of us could be, but this was not a comedy by any means, it was a heavy-footed melodrama.
For example, Gilles has a friend, Bernard (Etienne Chicot), who is as much of a wastrel as he is, as with most of the main players continually promising to leave all this behind and go to Paris though there's no guarantee they will be happy there since they will be stuck being their miserable selves, the one person they cannot run away from. Bernard tries to get together with Gilles' philosophically dissatisfied sister Elle (Sabine Haudepin), but she's not having it, and anyway he may be homosexual but disgusted with his impulses which leads him to seek out gay men and beat them up, landing him in prison. Hilarious, right? Well, it wasn't supposed to be, but neither was it insightful, with the characters like dogs chasing their tails and the sole reason we stayed superficially interested in the main couple was down to who played them (Dewaere would commit suicide the following year, one reason for his cult following). It could be that this constant whipping away of any kind of resolution was a point in itself, but why would you do that to yourself in this context? Music by Philippe Sarde.
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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