Hotel Desire (2011) – 2/5

Porn with a prologue

„Hotel Desire“ is a 40-minute German movie from 3.5 years ago. The film’s director and writer is Sergej Moya, mostly an actor (and a pretty mediocre one) himself and this is his third and so far last effort as a filmmaker. The first 20 minutes of the movie we get introduced to the main character, her private and professional life. Her son leaves for France in order to spend some time with his dad. Next she goes to the hotel where she works as a maid and we also get to know her colleagues. These include known German actors Frederick Lau, Herbert Knaup and Palina Rojinski (not an actress, not sure if she has talents in any area) plus the established, but not equally famous Trystan Pütter playing the antagonist and Jan-Gregor Kremp playing the over-the-top gay best friend, so a supposedly likable character in contrast to who he was on „23“ more than a decade earlier. However, the cast is just make-believe that this is an artistic movie. It is not. The whole direction and music reeks of pretense, but in the end everything this movie is memorable for is a very graphic sex scene between the main character and a hotel guest, who is played by Clemens Schick, another good German actor with decent recognition value. Making the decision to appear in this film was not too great from him though. He is also not blind in real life, but that is okay. I thought it was more difficult to believe that he did not recognize the woman before he touched her. His sense of smell should be strengthened to a way that he must have known there is somebody just centimeters away from him. You could also guess the direction of the film heading into pretty much adult film territory when you see the protagonist showering naked already in the very first scene and they are not hiding anything. Of course, the fact that the guest is blind makes this something entirely different than porn, right? No, it does not and the whole thing is as forgettable as the lesbian kiss included earlier in this movie as some sort of appetizer for what is about to come.

The story is pretty uninteresting too. The maid makes all kinds of mistakes at her job and yet the only one who gets punished is the one who recognized these mistakes. And if this is not already enough, the main character decides to have sex with a hotel guest and smoke (which activates the fire alarm) afterward, all this after she got almost fired on several occasions. The whole smoke-rain metaphor is pretty cringeworthy. But it also makes this film a perfect example of an ambitious filmmaker who just does not have the talent to deliver what is on his mind. The direction was not even too bad, but the writing was really weak at times. The protagonist’s metaphorical words about being ready for a little rain, after all it is the hottest day in seven years, were already on the cringeworthy side, plus a few more words from her you will recognize when you hear them, but the worst was probably the sentence she made about how only a blind man would be interested in her because she has a child. Oh well, that was one of the most embarrassing displays of foreshadowing I have ever come across in film. All in all, this film was certainly a failed attempt for Moya, especially in terms of writing, to a lesser extent in directing maybe too, but also in terms of acting, not from him though, but I can’t say I’m surprised that Volm is not having much of a career right now. The supporting cast was better. The scene with Knaup was fairly entertaining though, maybe Moya should rather try comedy, and really kept me from giving this film an even lower rating and from saying it is truly abysmal. But the positive recommendation is still as far away as it gets. The weak child actor early on and his poorly-written dialogues were not helping either. I do not recommend the watch here and give it a dedicated thumbs-down. I cannot understand at all why this is maybe the most famous German short film from the new millennium. Has to be the cast list, especially Lau maybe. The quality it is not and the film also did not achieve awards attention according to imdb. It is very much on the overseen side.