Room 36 (15)

Dir. Jim Groom, Great Britain, 2005

Cast: Paul Herzberg, Brian Murphy, Portia Booroff, Norman Mitchell, Frank Scantori

Beset by demons, persecuted by fate, at the whim of institutionalized corruption the film noir protagonist is not unlike the low-budget filmmaker. Ambivalence is the stock-in-trade of film noir, less a genre, more like a morbid neurosis, and of the British Film Industry, less a going enterprise, more an ongoing concern.

Perhaps it's natural then that low-budget British filmmakers should bring us Room 36, a hard-bitten yet recognizably British noir. If we watch horror to confess the savage inside us, in the typical film noir we worship our contingency to forces beyond us. Whether to chaos or an ultimate order matters little: to the patsy they feel the same.

Replete with characters who are in the wrong place at the wrong time but just don't know it yet, Room 36 has a premise that Hitchcock would have been proud of. In room 36 of a grotty London hotel a fat man awaits a prostitute. Next-door in room 38 an assassin hired by a top politician awaits his contact. Their respective visitors mistake the rooms and mayhem ensues. So it goes in film noir.

The filmmakers are clearly cine-literate. Director Jim Groom opens out the hotel rooms, while emphasizing their coffin-like interiors, with the tortured camera angles and fragmented lighting familiar in noir. Amidst the excellent black and white photography by David Read there are occasional flashes of colour in the Sin City vein.

Dialogue is minimal. This is fortunate because it is generally terrible when it appears. Swearing is used to convey the hardness of the world in which the characters move but there is none of the street-poetic slang of the original noirs where the language was as stylized as the settings. Noir is after all a fantasy. Undue realism disrupts its sacred space, which is why the extremely tenuous plot of Room 36 is less of a problem than it might be.

The acting is good enough although a little ropey in places. Paul Herzberg as the hitman and Frank Scantori as the fat man look the part. The film bears some of the misogyny, not to say sexual disgust, of its influences and its attempts to counter this are undermined by the exploitation of mostly female nudity. The men are lecherous, homicidal or ineffectual, while the women are avaricious or sexually manipulative and essentially victims. Everyone ends the story mutilated in some way.

However as a low-budget film Room 36 is an achievement. Those eager to dismiss it as derivative, cheap or exploitative should consider that Britain has a rich tradition of regurgitating genre material in low-budget B-pictures and that noir has a British heritage as well as an American one. Room 36 revels unapologetically in its B-picture status and for the most part does so very well.

Despite its nihilist-chic Room 36 lacks the black heart of other film noirs. Like the comic book elements of Sin City, its very British strain of burlesque distances us from the nihilism. Unlike the classic film noirs that mined a particular sense of societal unease, Room 36 like Sin City is simply pastiche. In other words it's basically junk food. Nevertheless if you enjoyed Sin City then I see no reason not to enter.