Lost Girls And Love Hotels Review
Lost Girls and Love Hotels (2020) Film Review, a movie directed by William Olsson, and starring Alexandra Daddario, Takehiro Hira, Carice van Houten, Misuzu Kanno, Kate Easton, Andrew Rothney, and Yasunari Takeshima.
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You know, for a movie that’s supposed to be dramatic and titillating, Lost Girls and Love Hotels sure makes me feel a whole lotta nothin. A nymphomaniacal American expat in Japan (Alexandra Daddario) goes on a BDSM filled tryst with a tall, dark, and handsome Yakuza gangster (Takehiro Hira) after sharing a moment appreciating a salacious Hokusai woodblock print — you know, the one with the lady and the octopus. We find that they’re both rather gloomy people looking for some form of escapism and a human connection that they can’t find anywhere else. While the chemistry between Hira and Daddario felt authentic to me, not much else about the movie did; and I doubt I’ll remember much about it a week from now. Daddario’s character Margaret is an instructor at a school for flight attendants in Tokyo, a job which she is rarely on time for, as she spends most nights with strange men at love hotels; though she has trouble finding gratification in these encounters, as she prefers to be submissive and masochistic to a degree that most men are uncomfortable with, that is until she meets Kazu (Hira) whose experience as a violent criminal gives him no discomfort binding or choking another human being. Maybe as a millennial I’ve just seen too much weird stuff, but if the intent of their sex scenes was supposed to make my palms sweaty, then they failed. If the director wants to excite me, then maybe he should have done a better job with character building moments so that their sexual encounters would mean something. I really just can’t relate to Daddario, whose submission fetish is a result of parental abandonment to say nothing of Hira who is so shrouded in mystery that we don’t learn much about him at all other than that he’s cheating on his fiancée. I was particularly annoyed at how the movie tried to trick me into having a fake cathartic moment towards the end when one of Daddario’s students, whom she had slighted by skipping graduation, smiles at her during a chance encounter. This interaction might have made me feel something had these characters had anything more than a token exchange at the beginning of the film. This B plot just felt like an afterthought, an attempt at giving Daddario greater dimensionality as a character, abandoned halfway through or perhaps edited down to meet studio demands in post production. Maybe it has to do with the fact that Catherine Hanrahan — the author of the novel on which the film is based — also wrote the screenplay despite having no known prior experience working in the film industry or as a screenwriter. I also have to say I found Daddario’s character a bit unlikable despite her beauty, as she and her expat friends come across as a bit entitled living in Japan and expecting the natives to adapt to their cultural and language expectations. The English language could not be more unlike Japanese, and the main Japanese people Daddario interacts with speak her language exceptionally well, while her character makes little effort to meet them halfway despite clearly having lived in Tokyo for a long time. Personally I find it hard to connect with someone with an attitude like that. This movie just feels like a watered-down version of Lost in Translation — sad culture-shocked Americans in Japan having an emotional affair sans Bill Murray’s sardonic wit — with a splash of Fifty Shades thrown in, served with flatfooted character moments shoehorned into the B plot. Not particularly satisfying and not a movie I’d recommend. Rating: 4/10. Leave your thoughts on this Lost Girls and Love Hotels review and the film below in the comments section. Readers seeking to support this type of content can visit our Patreon Page and become one of FilmBook’s patrons. Readers seeking more film reviews can visit our Movie Review Page, our Movie Review Twitter Page, and our Movie Review Facebook Page. Want up-to-the-minute notifications? FilmBook staff members publish articles by Email, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Flipboard.
