Cannes 2024 – Motel Destino, sex, lies & biscotos (review)

A year after presenting his Jeu de la Reine here, Karim Aïnouz today offers a neo-noir in a Brazil saturated with light. Ugh!

You who enter here prepare your eyelids. In any case, this is what a pre-credits warning card tells us about the mode: “We prefer to warn you that you are going to be amazed!” Let's break the suspense right away, if the film lets more light into its frame than necessary, it's entirely bearable. The general quality of the film, a little less. The action takes place in a motel in Nordeste, a sort of filthy Ibis where you can rent tiny rooms to have discreet sex. A young runaway will find refuge there, attracting the sympathy and then soon the wrath of the boss and the favors of the landlady.

We enter this “neon Noir” with desire. There is the humidity of the setting with these white dunes lying on a rough sea, these oily bodies ready to exult and a staging excited by all the surrounding interloper vibrations. The more or less love triangle that will gradually form has a lot going for it: the fragile, muscular young thug, the dilapidated old handsome man in the process of being “Mickeyrourkized” and a rather wild woman who is not afraid of anything. Problem, the Brazilian Karim Aïnouz who presented his bombshell just a year ago here Queen's Gamedoesn't really know what to do with these beautiful people.

Interview with Jude Law for The Queen's Game

This Motel Destino places his story in a caliente neo-noir atmosphere such as Hollywood knew how to reward us in the 80's and 90's (see James Foley, John Dahl, Adrian Lyne…) Despite a desire to be sticky, everything smells of gleaming aesthetics borders on advertising. The criminal background is not treated enough to instill any external tension and the characters remain too much like puppets to raise the fever. We therefore leave this furnace with heavy eyelids. Unfortunately, the light had nothing to do with it.

By Karim Aïnouz. With: Fabio Assunçao, Nataly Rocha, Iago Xavier… Duration: 1h55. Undetermined exit.