Motel Destino: Karim Aïnouz’s equatorial noir sweats with neon hues and sexual tension

Like Visconti’s erotically charged directorial debut Ossessione (1943), Motel Destino can in part be seen as a loose version of James M. Cain’s novel The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934). Director Karim Aïnouz sets the action in the province where he was born, Ceará on the north-eastern coast of Brazil; together with cinematographer Hélène Louvart (Pina, 2011; Rocks, 2019; La chimera, 2023) he portrays an equatorial landscape fundamental to the film’s story. Waves break on stone-flecked sand and the relentless heat is barely touched by a restless wind in the palm trees. Everyone’s half-dressed and everything is moving as, on the eve of his departure for São Paulo, young buck Heraldo (Iago Xavier) play-fights and frolics in the deep blue sea with his big brother Jorge (Renan Capivara).

It’s an undeniably homoerotic set-up. Aïnouz escaped homophobic Brazil to come of age in early 1990s New York as part of the New Queer Cinema scene. His debut feature Madame Satã (2002) premiered in Cannes with a content warning for its explicit depiction of gay sex; the complex female lead characters of his subsequent work saw this versatile filmmaker labelled a director of ‘women’s pictures’. A propulsive and compelling Latin American melodrama-cum-sexual thriller, Motel Destino encapsulates all of this, while evoking Aïnouz’s European influences (he has long been resident in Germany). We feel the presence of Pasolini and Fassbinder – particularly the latter’s stylised, colour-saturated Querelle (1982), adapted from Jean Genet’s novel. Like Ali, the central figure in Fassbinder’s Fear Eats the Soul (1974), Heraldo is an outsider eroticised both for his youth and the colour of his skin.

The motel of the title is a swinging hotspot that becomes both sanctuary and jail as Heraldo, grieving his dead brother, hides out from a feral, vengeful drugs gang presided over by imposing matriarch Bambina (Fabiola Liper). Having proved his worth as a handyman, Heraldo is adopted by the motel’s proprietors, the ageing, macho Elias (Fabio Assunção) and his wife Dayana (Nataly Rocha), plus their night porter Môco (Yuri Yamamoto). It’s a family unit of sorts, inflected by lust, betrayal and violence, with each character wanting something different. Elias is a frustrated patriarch with no children, his sexuality ambiguous; Dayana wants freedom. Having grown up without a father, Heraldo unzips his residual anger as he relates a brutal story from his childhood. The tension of this terrifically acted film rests on the question of who will survive the unsustainable oedipal tryst. 

With gorgeous art direction by Marcos Pedroso, the motel is a neon-hued version of the prison setting of Genet’s only film, Un chant d’amour (1950), in which every cell contains a sexual scenario. Like Genet’s prison guard, Elias prowls the corridors watching his clients through the hatches in the doors. Signs say ‘SILENCIO’ but sound designer Waldir Xavier punctuates the film’s soundtrack with rhythmic gasps and cries of fucking. “You hardly ever hear a man moaning,” Elias says, going to investigate. This sensuous sound design is interwoven with a score by composer Amine Bouhafa at times fittingly reminiscent of Ry Cooder’s music for Paris, Texas (1984), and ending in a rave explosion playing out over an unmissable psychedelic end-credit sequence.

Into the motel strays a bestiary of cats, goats, rutting donkeys and a huge cobra found coiled in a bathtub. The magically strange animal imagery evokes the midnight movies of Alejandro Jodorowsky or David Lynch, as do the nightmarish visions of Bambino’s gang that haunt Heraldo. Having literally dug their own graves, the star-crossed lovers escape back into civilisation naked, like Dorothy Vallens at the end of Blue Velvet (1986); gentle with animals, our hero is blessed by a miracle in the form of a white horse on the highway. It’s a heady brew of symbolism, which contrasts with idyllic memories and fantasies signposted by the texture of a home-movie style; colourists are the industry’s unsung heroes for the way they make a film look, and here Dirk Meier has excelled.

Sharing a European arthouse bloodline (and some key crew, such as editor Nelly Quettier) with the works of Alice Rohrwacher, Gaspar Noé and Claire Denis, Motel Destino premiered in Competition at Cannes 2024 alongside Sean Baker’s Anora. In repertory cinema heaven, I can imagine the two films double-billed for their mutual vision of sexual pleasure palaces where life can be brutal but with neon beauty to be found between the cracks.

► Motel Destino is in UK cinemas from May 9.