‘Motel Destino’: Cannes Review

Dir. Karim Ainouz. Brazil/France/Germany, 2024. 112mins

Boy, is it hot and steamy in Brazil’s Ceara, a sweaty seaside town in Karim Ainouz’s home state in the northeast of the country. Hotter than the US setting for The Postman Always Rings Twice (both the novel and its two film adaptations), from which this colour-drenched potboiler freely borrows and augments. And it’s certainly more sex-filled, if not quite sexier. Ainouz’s second consecutive film to play in Cannes Competition could hardly look more different from 2023’s Henry VIII/Katherine Parr Tudor drama Firebrand. It’s as if he ripped the lid off every pot of neon for a Paris, Texas lookbook by way of the tropics.

There’s a sly sense of humour at play throughout 

By setting his drama within the confines of what is politely referred to as a ‘love motel’ – although this doesn’t quite convey the functionality of the titular Motel Destino which aims to provide ‘premium fucking’ on a budget – Aïnouz plays with the concept of eroticism, which is by far the most interesting element of this drama: flame orange sheets, infra-red lenses and periwinkle flares of blue aside. Each room of the Motel Destino heaves and groans with the urgency of the physical needs being expressed inside: will the much-anticipated sex between 21 year-old grifter Heraldo (Iago Xavier) and the older owner’s restless wife Dayana (Nataly Rocha) connect with audiences amidst all the groans and shouts? The English-language Firebrand failed to deliver on its commercial promise; Motel Destino will take a different route and should make a pulpier impact out of a sex-filled Cannes. As the Motel owners know, sex sells – even if it doesn’t always live up to the promise on the colourful tin.

There’s a sly sense of humour at play throughout Motel Destino, a wink to the camera which is there from the very first scenes. Heraldo and his ill-fated brother frolic in the bluer-than-blue seas of Ceara; while his brother wants to settle down, Heraldo is off to the bright lights of Rio to work in a garage. Not before they pay off a debt to the cartoonish mobster Bambina (Fabuona Liper), however. She’s a local drug dealer, whose bodyguard’s slung machine gun contrasts wonderfully with his tomato-coloured budgie-smuggler. She’ll let them go only after they kill a local French rival. Heraldo goes to a bar and ends up locked into the Motel Destino, a – constant – victim of his sexual needs. Tragedy strikes and he has to go into hiding. Where better than Motel Destino, where he left his ID card and Dayana is bored enough to offer him respite.

At the heart of Motel Destino is the story of Heraldo, a lad with not much of a past and not much of a future either if he won’t stop giving into his primal urges. When we meet the older, unpredictable motel owner Elias (Fabio Assunção, at points looking like a younger Willem Dafoe), the Postman reference are knocking loudly at Motel Destino’s gated door. It’s not a case of whether Heraldo and Dayana will give into their carnal urges, but when. And when – not if – the unpredictable Elias finds out, how will he respond?

Ainouz knows we know. So he gives the audience other things to look at: mostly colour – so much colour! –  but also rutting donkeys and an omnipresent goat, sex toys and a corpse, and constant sweat that looks like dripping diesel. And Heraldo is so young. He’s the type of kid who carries a gun yet becomes alarmed when someone breaks a ‘no smoking’ rule. Talking of signs, the one in the Motel Destino corridor urging ‘silencio’ is one of the funniest around. 

Ainouz is becoming an unpredictable director, and in a good way. From 2019’s Un Certain Regard winner Invisible Life to Mariner Of The Mountains (2021), Firebrand, and now this, he increasingly looks like a filmmaker who is trying his hand at several styles and finding out he’s adept at all of them. Motel Destino may not make a profound impact, but it does make an impact nonetheless. His core trio of actors works well together and, as Dayana, Nataly Rocha in particular gives a nicely modulated performance that helps ground the two characters who sniff hungrily around her. She’s alternately brazen and vulnerable – but mostly to her own greedy impulses.

As befits a film which foregrounds its aesthetic, the music is suitably brash and effective, as is the sound design. (Who came up with all those guttural groans?). And, thanks to production designer Marcos Pedroso, the Motel Destino itself is a tour de squalid force which comes alive under Hélène Louvart’s lens. Perhaps it’s all that noise in the rooms, but the film itself does seem to shudder voluptuously at times, alongside its patrons.