Intercourse means, besides the one you’re probably already thinking, “conversation”. “28 Hotel Rooms” is about both. “Inter.” Enter. “Con.” Connection. In a compartment called a “hotel room.” A proper hotel with amenities.
This is poetry of the flesh, what bodies express.
Compartmentalized, like verses or stanzas.
There IS such a thing as bodily love -- not emotional, or reasonable, or shaped by social expectations and not lust -- just the real and deep connection to someone else’s body through one’s own body. Almost everyone’s first love is skin-against-skin with the mother when newborns are laid all bloody and gooey on their mother’s chest. Some babies develop depression symptoms after birth: the change is too severe, they are too deeply affected. The prescription is for the mother to go to bed naked with the naked (except for a diaper) baby beside her. They should stay there together for a day at least. It works. Skin-against-skin is innocent and reassuring, deeply satisfying, soul-making. In the tribal instinctive world the baby travels always against the mother in a shawl or a carry strap or a parka hood. An infant who is not embraced, stroked, kissed, will die of mirasmus. Simply giving up. The mother who does not embrace, stroke or kiss will not bond and may be grateful if the infant dies.
As adults we meet others in multiple ways, often interrupted, so that the demands of household and job, the expectations of family and partners, all interfere -- breaking off, confusing, submerging. What would it be like if two people could express skin-to-skin relationship in a compartmented place sheltered from everyday life? This is the question asked by “28 Hotel Rooms.” Two people, matched as to age and social class; both employed in ways that let them move around the world anonymously, discretely; both emotionally mature; intelligent; self-determining but open to relationship. This is an intercourse of the bodies, without dominating or damaging. Just enough difference and change-over-time to remain interesting -- not quite enough to break the relationship.
Simple relationship is very rare. People have intense relationships via the internet that might seem protected and intimate, but they are suffused with fantasies, saturated with the skills of rhetoric, stripped of smell/taste/temperature. Everything is recorded and therefore subject to scrutiny beyond the moment, loss of secrecy, reflection that is objective and outside -- the way this movie is observed by us. Yet we are drawn in, we share as we cannot in an internet exchange.
Modern corporate life, based on global travel to conferences or speaking engagements with strangers, rarely one-on-one but rather in panels and around tables, can induce a kind of mirasmus. Separation from family, familiar environments, comfort foods. Time dislocation. Pressure of tasks. Judgment from others with power. Politics. There are plenty of films about these corrosive effects on morality and ability to relate to others. Many others about the lust for strangeness and secrecy in a luxury setting. People long for a zipless fuck, in Erica Jong’s phrase. But this film is neither without friction nor just a fuck.
Few know any relationships this simple and yet profound. In spite of being well-matched, the two characters are different enough to intrigue each other. She is the cool analyst; he is the extravagant poet. Yin/yang. Gender doesn’t have a lot to do with it. Both are able to be present in the way of a child: curious, responding in the moment, no filtering. This is only possible to portray when actors are very skillful in a particular way that is accessible to a camera. This kind of acting originated as a “method” of establishing the reality of stage plays that portrayed relationships and society in a subtle and revealing way. It is a technique that allows the actor to inhabit the character so thoroughly and without restraint that their own inner life can show through the assumed role.
The brains of human beings, we now know and can even see with the help of electromagnetic, computer-augmented instruments, are a symphony of relationships and therefore can play many “styles” of identity, all of them valid and “true,” but responsive to what is outside the person by presenting different aspects of the self. They call it the connectome. These two actors, Marin Ireland and Chris Messina, are so skillful that they can move in and out of the script, sometimes using memorized lines and sometimes speaking their own thoughts. In any case, their task was to create many scenes -- jazz riffs -- that could be edited into a “shaped” film by the writer/director. I haven’t seen this kind of acting since auditing acting classes taught by AK. There is a kind of purity -- as opposed to intensity -- that engages empathy. This is not “bubble gum sentimentality” with a perky childish female and a prince who will make her life wonderful.
True enough, the compartmentalization and intermittence that protects this relationship, constantly renewing it, is also a confinement and interdiction that prevents some kinds of development. The naked lovers shout from their balcony at the people below: “life is a puzzle -- help us figure it out.” That’s also a description of the movie. If there were 28 hotel rooms -- chosen out of hundreds that the site managers looked at, but all in LA except for a few in NYC -- there were also hundreds of film shoots, compartmentalized and intermittent, that had to be edited as a puzzle in narrative aesthetics.
This is a very interesting interview. Two things struck me: that Marin was in another show at the time they were shooting, so to save travel she just slept in the rooms where they shot this film: continuity. Second, she has an intriguing theory about how to find an “eye of the storm” spot that’s near the action but not in the way. “Nobody’s talking to you and there’s this bubble that you can create for yourself.”
http://www.blackbookmag.com/movies/actress-marin-ireland-talks-her-new-drama-28-hotel-rooms-1.54873 Here’s another good interview that overlaps some.
http://www.aroundphilly.com/blog/2012/11/19/28-questions-for-chris-messina-about-28-hotel-rooms/ And an interview with Chris.
The different levels in considering this film include that it is a narrative in images and 28 scenes; it is a particular kind of acting; it is a genre to itself: minimum of characters, long duration shots while characters develop and think through issues; it is invented along a spine of trajectory through time. Viewers seem to wonder about conventional moral issues, not allowing any deviation from marital faithfulness. The actors involved wonder about their careers and how this film fits into them. In real life, as friends, these two worry about protecting and supporting each other. Probably there are ten-year-olds out there wondering whether this couple is really having sex. The film is as pristine and self-contained as a pearl -- think about it all you like. It remains itself.
The contrast is “Monogamy,” same fine cinematographer, same exuberant male actor, but all distraction, confusion, context, family, friends, kids, dog, commotion, bargaining, implications . . . the “hero” goes from photographer to voyeur to detective to stalker to -- aw, just a dawg.
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