If you love feeling lost, if you love equations with multiple unknowns, if you like to wallow in craziness, forbidden worlds and like enigmatic characters, it is possible that "Starfish Hotel" will touch your film buff's strings. On the surface, it looks like the work of a smart alec. In fact it's an emotional work that plunges the audience into awesome depths. It falls somewhere between "Reconstruction" (Christoffer Boe), "Angel Dust", (Sogo Ishii), and "Inside Job" (Nicholas Winding Refn), it's a worrying mix that strangely resembles nothing you've ever seen. It won't leave you indifferent.
In his pedestrian little life - the one which links his poky apartment with his cage-like office, Yuichi Arisu has only one escape mechanism the tortuous writings of Jo Kuroda, master of mystery stories, in the company of whom he dives headlong into Darkland. One day, his wife, Chisato, with whom he now maintains the most cursory of relationships, disappears. Yuichi decides to hire a private detective who leads him to Wonderland, a maze-like whorehouse which Chisato herself is said to have designed and where it seems she is now working. Starfish Hotel is unlikely to appeal to everyone. But we should remember that the greatest films so often mean controversy and incompatability of point of view. The slow pace and strange ambiance set up from the outset throws you to say the least. This is where the film's great success lies also: to sound the unspeakable, or rather see how far the audience can blend into a daydream. For those who buy it right away, the take off is intense, the experience enormously stimulating. As it is, it's an impressive film which points at stereotypes all the more to torture them, it moves in different directions, and simulates the fossilization of feelings to achieve a peculiar emotional depth, it doesn't give in to the demands of the impatient viewer and, to reassure the sceptic, doesn't attempt to fill some lack of substance with a legion of references. Everything a lie. Should we think of other films as we eye this odd object (Cronenberg, Lynch, all those related to deviance and a refusal of norms) its radicalness and sensitive beauty distinguishes it from all and sundry, and above all belies the gaudiness of the images. The composition of the cinematography in no way detracts from the content. Quite the contrary, it serves to emphasize the malaise.
The presence of a giant rabbit which seems to have escaped from Donnie Darko, originally inspired by the masks in the orgy in Eyes Wide Shut, only serves to reinforce the central theme of the film: literary creativity - a hackneyed theme for sure - which brings on the slew of metaphysical questions (how do we write a book? Where does one find ones's inspiration?) Jolly good. Good but John Williams (not to be confused with the famous composer) is perfectly aware of these hitches and carefully avoids them. For example the rabbit is closer to "Alice in Wonderland", which takes us into our dreams, our neurosies and other fantasies. Under the mask is hidden a monstruous individual with multiple personalities (demiurge, writer, the presumed murderer…). It is the very symbol of the film, which as we keep digging, sports different personalities and ends up losing itself - the final dead-end reminds us of Tarkovski). Frightening vertigo and a delightful abandon.
Central to the narrative, a character stuck in his gloomy routine and calm on the surface, sets off on a search for his missing wife and discovers a zone of shady shadows, unspeakable secrets, of rough things which seize up the mechanics; all of which he never even imagined the existence of. A descent into hell? No, not even that. The setting is too artificial to search for something realistic. Does it force you to imagine? Yes. A character manipulated by a temperamental writer unable to wipe out fictional creatures from his fertile mind. Certainly, but there is more. In the end isn't it the viewer himself who becomes the impotent witness of all this adventure? Like the hero passively facing the unfolding events, aren't we the plaything of the director's manipulation? The more we think about it the more the film acquires a potentially freaky dimension. By doing this, John Williams revisits all those detective icons (the femme fatale, disappearances, the absurd final twist) to better difuse them and provoke thought more than did the Wong Kar-wai film, "2046",- Proustian - on lost memories and love affairs never forgotten; resulting not in a melancholic dimension but a delirious one; a fierce trip.
It reflects the course of the British director who for the past 17 years has been living in the archipelago and has clearly not been able to adapt to an untameable Japan. Starfish Hotel is a traumatising work on the loss of self, which aims to wipe out the words rational and conventional from its vocabulary. Even when it seems to give some clues, it is only so as to better lose one in its meandering maze. The dramatic progression obeys these effects: leaving from an anonymous world (crowds, huge buildings, geometric constructions) to move toward a more intimate and twisted register (Wonderland, a whorehouse with menacing corners). It's an exercise in literary deconstruction, to-ing and fro-ing from thriller to fantasy with surprising ease. A kind of enormous Pandora's box in which dreams abound. Starfish Hotel explores grand themes (interior exile, parallel worlds, mental confusion) with a profusion of effects which miraculously aren't contrived, because they are coherent with the writer's twisted world. In other words, playful and worrying, funny and sad, blasé and anxious, abstruse and cruel. Also screened at BIFFF, here we have one of the most mind-blowing films at the Cognac festival.
Written by Romain Le Vern
Translated by B & F Lafaye, with assistance from Teobesta Tesfa E