Newly restored and never before released in North America!
A tale of two broken souls. A call-girl named Yumi, “night-blooming flower,” and Tetsuro, a married man with a debt to the yakuza, have a violent rendezvous in a cheap love hotel. Years later, haunted by the memory of that night, they reconnect and begin a strange love affair. Determined to finish what they started, they return to the scene of their first macabre passion. With a taste for wicked absurdity while coursing with undercurrents of operatic emotion, at times verging on a musical, Love Hotel is moved by the irrational forces that attract two bodies together. It’s a film with a uniquely materialist sense of eros manifested in Shinji Somai’s long takes, each shot a tightrope-like predicament flushed with earthly tension and live-wire physicality. Made in the same year as Typhoon Club, this elegiac erotica is one of Somai’s most bewitching and unnervingly romantic works, the high-water mark of Nikkatsu Studio’s legendary Roman Porno cycle of films. (Cinema Guild)
TRT: 88 min
"A softcore Roman Porno with a distinctly Antonioni flavor." —Bingham Bryant, The Brooklyn Rail
"Maybe the last great master of Japanese cinema." —Kiyoshi Kurosawa, director of Cure and Tokyo Sonata
"Shinji Somai's films have the power to change and sustain your lfie." —Ryusuki Hamaguchi, director of Drive My Car and Evil Does Not Exist
(Available to download after screening date)