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‘Motel Destino’ Review: Karim Aïnouz’s Horned-Up Neon-Noir Keeps Its Cool While Getting Hot and Heavy
Back in his sensual element, Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz serves up a wicked little crime tale in the sexy, slinky 'Motel Destino.'
With mirrors on the ceiling but definitely no pink champagne on ice, the run-down roadside sex den that houses most of Karim Aïnouz’s Olympically horny new film isn’t so much a palace of pleasure as a this-will-do hideaway for the illicitly amorous couples (or throuples, or more, no judgment here) checking into any of its hastily wiped-down rooms. Slow like honey and heavy with mood — to quote Fiona Apple, though she left out the relevant descriptors “oozy” and “sticky” — “Motel Destino” is correspondingly light on plot, to the point that it feels like a cheeky genre experiment: a film in which all the noirish types and tropes are present and correct, but everyone’s just too damn hot and bothered and oversexed to get much killing done. The home turf in question isn’t just Brazil, but specifically the coast of the northeastern Cearà region, where Aïnouz was born and raised, and which he last depicted on screen in 2014’s gorgeous queer romance “Futuro Beach.” Written with contributions from the director and from regular Ira Sachs collaborator Mauricio Zacharias, Wislan Esmeraldo’s lean script heavily recalls various iterations of “The Postman Always Rings Twice” in its setup, only to then teasingly leave us waiting for the doorbell.
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