‘The Hotel’: Wang Xiaoshuai returns to his roots in pandemic film
"The Hotel" was created when director Wang Xiaoshuai and his friends found themselves stuck in a Chiang Mai hotel during the onset of COVID-19. Unfortunately, the characters' experiences will fail to resonate with the many in China who have lived through lockdown.
After 30 years of filmmaking, Wáng Xiǎoshuài 王小帅 has adapted to the changing conditions of the Chinese film industry with the same entrepreneurial energy as in the 1990s, when international film festivals recognized him as one of the most prominent young Chinese directors. He — along with his “Sixth Generation” contemporaries — was among the first to venture into independently financed film production. His latest, The Hotel, feels like a return to his roots, because once again the director worked independently of big studios, with a very low budget and in a limited timeframe.
The Hotel is a direct reflection of pandemic realities both on and off screen. It would not exist if two filmmaking families — Wang and his wife, the film producer Liú Xuán 刘璇; and producer Zhāng Yuán 张元 and his wife, the scriptwriter Níng Dài 宁岱, and their actress-director daughter Níng Yuányuán 宁元元 — had not decided to spend Chinese New Year together in Chiang Mai with a group of their friends: poet and novelist Yě Fū 野夫, model and actress Qú Yǐng 瞿颖, actress and TV host Huáng Xiǎolěi 黄小蕾, and actor and TV host Dài Jūn 戴军 — all of whom agreed to star in the film. Wang explains that shooting took only 14 days, preceded by 10 days of looking for film equipment eventually obtained from a Thai film crew that finished shooting a commercial just as Chiang Mai was going into lockdown.
The setup: In a generic resort hotel in northern Thailand, a group of Chinese visitors spending Chinese New Year abroad gets stranded upon the onset of COVID-19. The flights back are canceled, and the only thing left to do is chill by the pool and wait for the situation to change. The hotel guests epitomize the Chinese upper-middle class — a middle-aged Wuhan-based university professor and his student-turned-lover wife, an established painter from Hong Kong, a wealthy but blind older man waiting for an operation with his young Thai-Chinese caregiver, and a young Beijing woman, Sova, who is about to turn 20. Stuck in the hotel with her mother who is scared of catching the virus and refuses to go outside, Sova is restless and increasingly impatient. On the eve of her birthday, her mother promises to reveal a long-kept secret. In the meantime, all the hotel guests face their unresolved personal problems and mutual discords that the pandemic brings to the fore.
The Hotel marks Wang’s return to his 1990s guerrilla-style low-budget filmmaking, with a small crew and funds largely gathered outside of China. He once again works alongside Zhang Yuan, with whom he started his career when they collaborated on Mama (妈妈 māma). Notably, the film has not gone through Chinese censors, which means it lacks the “dragon seal” (龙标 lóng biāo) that all Chinese films approved for domestic as well as international exhibition/distribution will have. The Hotel was produced by Hong Kong General Film Company Limited, and would be labeled a foreign film if it were to ever premiere in China.
The Hotel is an example of a new direction in China’s art cinema — creating mainland Chinese films outside of China. Korean-Chinese filmmaker Zhāng Lǜ 张律 has already paved the way, creating low-budget auteur transnational co-production projects in Korea and Japan. There are many overseas Chinese graduates who have completed their debut short and full-length works at film schools abroad, such as Zhào Dānyáng 赵丹阳 with An Excessive Day (最后⼀天 zuìhòu yī tiān). This year, many older and younger filmmakers and intellectuals have fled China due to its strict zero-COVID measures. The 2018 Film Production Law that extended the censorship period has also not helped the country retain its film talent.
In Wang Xiaoshuai’s film, the young Thai-Chinese caregiver recalls his grandfather — a displaced Kuomintang soldier — teaching him Mandarin and singing songs from his hometown. By referring to the history of the Chinese diaspora in Thailand, Wang tries to connect to the local realities and come to terms with the choice to go into exile — something he feels keenly now that he’s moved to the UK.
Despite this explicit mention of geography, The Hotel is a timeless and placeless mystery drama. Most of the scenes take place by the swimming pool, which is a setting reminiscent of many international art films across decades: La Piscine (1969, dir. Jacques Deray), Swimming Pool (2003, dir. François Ozon), Stealing Beauty (1996, dir. Bernardo Bertolucci) A Bigger Splash (2015, dir. Luca Guadagnino). But the location — the eponymous hotel — becomes key to understanding the film’s main problem. Hotels have always been a place of refuge for elites in times of crisis, locked safely inside their own world of small intrigues and big heartbreaks.
If Wang’s last black and white film, The Days (冬春的日子 dōngchūn de rìzi), is a complex portrait of a pair of young artists, The Hotel is a patchwork made up of characters painfully oblivious to their own privilege and comfortably disconnected from the outside world, who delve into Freudian explorations that feel outdated. Especially in light of horrific lockdown stories that have surfaced in China in the past year, the privileged malaise of the characters in The Hotel feel even more far-flung. It is a missed opportunity to tell a pandemic-set coming-of-age story that resonates with people’s actual experiences during the long days of lockdown.
