Dir. Brice Cauvin, France, 2006, 95 mins, Subtitles
Cast: Laurent Lucas, Helene Fillieres, Anouk Aimee, Julie Gayet
Review by Philippa Bradnock
Parisien couple Marion (Fillieres) and Philippe (Lucas) leave their two sons with parents and depart for a Venetian holiday. At the train station they pick up the bag of a mysterious middle Eastern man. They decide not to go to Venice. On their return to Paris sinister things happen and their relationship begins to break down.
Hotel Harabati seeks to recreate the middle class paranoia and unease of Haneke’s Hidden or Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (referenced in the aborted trip to Venice and the subsequent photographs), focusing on the breakdown of a family in the face of inexplicable intrusion from outside. The first half hour of the film sets this up well, and director Brice Cauvin’s static framing shots and the evocation of the family’s bohemian lifestyle create a nice tension between quotidien mundanity and the eery happenings. But beyond this nothing happens or develops.
Our protagonists inexplicably stop talking to each other and abruptly become unhinged. Philippe sits moodily in a series of cafes, does badly at work and strikes up a friendship with a man who subsequently disappears. Marian mooches around the flat, ignores the phone and visitors and lounges strikingly with her sons as they sleep. The film is so preoccupied with its atmosphere that it skips over basic plot and characterisation details: where were they if not in Venice? Why take the bag in the first place? The invocation of an ill-defined terrorist threat to schools (because they guy was, like, middle Eastern) and Philippe’s flirtation with Judaism is a tired shortcut to evoking contemporary fear which again goes nowhere.
Nothing doesn’t happen in an art cinema, people-standing-around-talking-and-smoking way. Nothing happens in a way which suggests that no one knows quite what the film is meant to be about, in a written-hastily-on-the-back-of-a-napkin way. A blow-by-blow explanation is obviously at odds with the nature of the film, but there must be some spine to hang things off. In Hidden there was surveillance paranoia and the nature of film and observation, in Don’t Look Now grief and the line between the spiritual and the occult. Cauvin has said that the events are for the audience to interpret, but it would reassure to feel that he might have formulated his own idea as well.
There is also a rather depressing preoccupation with the enviable dilemmas of the middle classes. The couple’s ‘friend’, a doctor, pressures them to move out of their ‘rathole’ and buy, and uses their son’s drawing in her book about maladjusted children. Philippe’s mother buys rubbish at auction and deposits it around their home. If Marian and Philippe were more fleshed-out characters one might feel sympathy with these petty woes. But instead their eventual flight to Syria seems like bourgeois wish-fulfilment. Marion’s Luddite tendencies (no TV, no mobile phone) find satisfaction tilling the soil in a romantically remote land. The poverty of foreigners is so much more enchanting than one’s own.
Hotel Harabati is beautifully shot and interestingly atmospheric. It is Cauvin’s first feature and his second will be intriguing to watch. But it remains an empty experience: all style and no screenplay.
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