New Rose Hotel (Abel Ferrara, 1998)

 

Abel Ferrara’s singular (well, of course) New Rose Hotel is a fascinatingly displaced piece of work, a globe-spanning tale of conspiracy and manipulation and perhaps eventual catastrophe, built around a hundred million dollar transaction, that takes place almost entirely in hotel rooms, bars and the like, major events recounted to us third hand or else briefly glimpsed on blurry surveillance screens. Christopher Walken (dizzily idiosyncratic even by his standards) plays Fox, mastermind of a scheme to lure a brilliant sought-after Japanese scientist away from his corporate base, the plan consisting almost entirely of dangling a woman that the scientist won’t be able to resist (Asia Argento’s Sandy), complicated when Fox’s faithful lieutenant X (Willem Dafoe) also falls for Sandy, to the extent of the two talking about getting married. The plan works improbably well, and Fox collects his fee, but then things fall apart; Sandy vanishes, and the two men have to make a run for it. Ferrara’s astounding structural coup has the story essentially ending some twenty minutes before the end (and that’s with various momentous developments merely mentioned in passing), thereafter focusing on X as he goes to ground and mournfully runs through the events we’ve already seen, the film revisiting prior scenes with added details and shifted emphases that suggest the two men perhaps never fully grasped what they were involved in, Sandy increasingly taking on the contours of a classically unknowable noir-type woman. One is left with the sense of a movie that even if barely of this world in many of its particulars, taps a universal capacity for loss and regret (and, especially in the various songs we see performed, for fragile beauty); the ending constitutes no form of closure, provoking on the contrary a sense that Ferrara's film would as happily have circled back to continue picking obsessively at its own bones, and so on and so on indefinitely.