David O'ConnellHotel
May 12th 2011 05:42
Hotel is primarily a puzzle, an elliptical cinematic mystery in which the clues are obscure and rationed out judiciously. Jessica Hauser’s second film boasts an expanding, creepy vibe evoked by the sterility of its surrounds, a remote hotel in the Austrian Alps amongst dense woodlands. This is where the prim, smartly-attired Irene (Franziska Weisz) is beginning her first day behind the reception desk. Even as she is having her duties explained to her, a discordant note is felt in the strangely underpopulated vacuum of this place.
Irene is a young woman of few words; she makes little effort to endear herself to her co-workers and keeps to herself. She learns that the living quarters assigned to her belonged to her predecessor, a girl named Eva S. who mysteriously disappeared, leaving no clue as to why. In a drawer, Irene finds a pair of Eva’s glasses, the only physical remnant of her time in the hotel. After her own are damaged by a possibly resentful co-worker, she's forced to use Eva's distinct pair.
A mystery envelops Irene’s lonely days of quietude, fulfilling her duties with minimal fuss. But little light is shed on proceedings by Hausner whose formal, stylistically compact direction – last seen to great effect in 2009’s Lourdes – enhances the ambiguity to which every minutely adjusted gesture adheres.
Hausner’s camera rarely moves; if it does it’s for the purpose of a graceful interaction with objects beyond her meticulously wrought frame. Ambient sound is used to create disquiet in numerous scenes of Irene standing in the woods, a place that becomes central to the mystery – if one even exists at all, for there is little reason to suspect any strange goings on beyond the subtle inferences of Hausner’s moody manipulation. In many instances Irene stands alone, either roaming the surrounds or on duty, processing seemingly innocuous sounds before ignoring them.
Irene (Franziska Weisz)
An ominous weight is placed on a creepy totem, known as the' Lady of the Woods', encased in a glass display inside the hotel; central to a local legend, the supposed site of her lair is a cave into which Irene is seen venturing a couple of times. Is it a place of symbolic sublimation or home to genuine clues about the missing Eva S?
Hausner’s makes brilliant use of harsh lighting in direct contrast to darkness; she produces an eerie counterpoint at times, especially in the film’s most potent motif – the figure of Irene (or is it Eva? or a doppelganger?) dissolving across the borderline between well-lit hallway into a blackness that seems to swallow her whole.
Hotel (2004) is bound to frustrate the hell out of some viewers; mostly constructed of minimal gestures that infuse wordless sequences with sinister undertones, objectively speaking the film feels paper-thin. But Hausner builds the intrigue through repetition; her love of ambiguity increases via the sensation that more is happening just beyond the frame than we’re being allowed access to.
An enemy of overstatement, Hausner has cast her film with great skill; Weisz’s perpetual detachment, rather than off-putting and alienating, feels like a logical extension of her director’s intent, creating unease right up to the chilling final frame. It’s this notion of the insoluble that gives the film its stately, arthouse allure.
The Lady of the Woods
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