With his directorial debut, Santa Ikegami aims to leverage his experience as a playwright, theatre director, and screenwriter for tv and cinema (e.g. V. Maria (2025) by Daisuke Miyazaki) to deliver a narrative that explores themes that are closer to his heart. While the title At The Lovehotel implies a certain interest in sexuality, Ikegami merely seeks to utilize the setting of the love hotel to explore the struggle of establishing a sexual relationship and the way this struggle, due to capitalistic and consumerist thought, has been exploited.
While the doors of the rooms at Hotel Rupo remain shut, the shouts and screams that drip out into the corridors confront Kosuke Kujo (Kota Fuiji), a divorced man who works there as front-desk worker, with the reality of sex and render him unable to close off the space of his own fantasy. The only safe place within the love hotel – a space where sex’s presence can be counter-acted, is the staff-room.
One day, after finishing his shift together with Hazuki Aida (Sara Dounishita), the daughter of the owner, and Lana (Georgina Gette), a cleaner, Kujo meets up with his ex-wife (Ayano Kojima) and learns that she, due to her husband’s wife, will soon move with their child Riko (Shicho) to Canada.
Santa Ikegami impresses the spectator with the subtle way in which he plays with association – with what the concatenation of signifiers produces of meaning – to unfold his narrative. The intermingling of loud sexual screams signals, by clashing with Hazuki’s enigmatic statement “I don’t wanna end up like you” and the evoked reality of his divorce, that the oppressive effect sex sorts on Kujo is connected with his marital failure. The sexual sounds, however, do not only indirectly confront him with his marital failure – the fracture of his own sexual relationship, but also amplifies the gap between sexual pleasure and the phantasy of what cannot be written: The sexual relationship.
The whole narrative, in fact, consists in playing with associative connections to approach the impossibility of The Sexual Relationship from different angles. For instance, the reluctance Hazuki shows towards a vibrating vibrator, by being linked with a sudden infraction of traumatic imagery as she walks on the street, is revealed as being grounded in a sexual trauma, in a brutal destabilizing bodily inscription of the impossibility of writing The sexual relationship.
The reliance on association, on creating signifying links by evocatively concatenating signifiers, enables Ikegami to exploit signifying effect of punctuation and structure his narrative as a intertwining of ‘sentences’ that, by not being given any punctuation yet, puzzle the spectator (Structure-note 1). The moments featuring Ai (Kyomi Sawada) and Nozomi (Nanami Kajikawa) deliver the clearest example of such unfinished sentence: the carefree pleasure of eating a parfait together, their conversation concerning reincarnation, sneaking upon the roof of the love hotel, …. Where do these moments lead to?
Other fragmentary moments offer, by way of thematical association, some elaboration of the narrative’s main theme: the way subjects and society deal with the non-writability of The sexual relationship. We are introduced to the male underground idol Futa (Alan Abe), who seeks to financially exploit the infatuation of his fan Misako (Nanami Kawakami) with the bodily sign of his non-existent phallic possession and her ‘insecure’ intoxication with the possibility of writing The sexual relationship with him (Narra-note 1). Hazuki invites Lana to keep the necklace they found in the room, despite its female owner showing up – “Don’t be abused, abuse them instead”. Some time later, Hazuki is being called to a room by Mayu (Ryoka Noya), her childhood friend who by doing Papakatsu, finding sugar daddies, delivers her the scumbag responsible for her traumatic experience (Narra-note 2).
However, what do all these different approaches to the non-writability of The sexual relationship culminate in? What message does Ikegami ultimately seeks to formulate? In our view, Ikegami wishes to expose the difference between appearances – the signifiers we address to the other as ego, the phantasmatic way we perceive the other from our own subjective position – and our subjective truth, that which we hide with our imaginary enunciations but does not fail to speak through our interpretations of the Other.
To put in the terms of the opening sequence: We wander, as subjects, through our own love-hotel corridor, interpreting the sounds emanating from the closed doors as fictions of sexual harmony while remaining silent, a sign of our reluctance to bring our subjectivity into play – at the level of romance. We long for the fantasized romantic happiness behind the doors, yet fail to realize that what inhibits us is nothing other than her choice to silently wander through its corridors.
Daichi Furuya, who served as editor, and Santa Ikegami, the director, open At The Lovehotel with an energetic and evocative sequence that does not merely pulls the spectator straight into the narrative but truly emerges him into the seedy setting. However, what gives the opening sequence its inviting character is not merely the fast-paced concatenation of shots, the variety of shot-perspectives, the interweaving of visual decorations (slow-motion) or the energetic combination of static and dynamic shots, but the way non-diegetic music is utilized to harmonize the visual eclecticism and the effective manipulation of diegetic sounds – the crescendo of sexual screams of pleasure – to evoke the intrusive and oppressive sexuality has attained for Kujo.
Later in the narrative, Ikegami turns to musical accompaniment to amplify the subjective impact of certain signifiers on the subject – e.g. the way Kujo’s ex-wife’s signifiers concerning Canada and Riko disintegrate his attempt to realize some fatherhood.
After the introductory sequence, the compositional energy unsurprisingly abates and a more straightforward composition realizes itself (e.g. a concatenation of static shots to frame conversational moments). However, due to Yoichi Umeki’s cinematography, i.e. the way he thoughtfully seeks to create colour-contrast within interior and exterior-scenes, a certain eccentricity comes to define the filmic atmosphere.
With At The Lovehotel, Santa Ikegami delivers a self-assured debut that does not easily give away its thematical message. The spectator is skilfully led to wander throughout the various narrative corridors of the impossibility of The sexual relationship and come to the realization that our own preoccupation with the fantasy of sexual harmony as what inhibits us in the rugged field of romance. Recommended viewing.
Notes
Structure-note 1: What elevates the puzzling nature of these sequences is that they do not seem to bear any relationship with the other narrative fragments. The first sequence merely serves to highlight the contrast between Kujo’s troubled existence and their carefree attitude, between his lived reality and the nostalgic fantasy of seishun – a lost fantasy he longs for – he imposes on them.
Narra-note 1: The insecurityHazuki expresses towards Futa signals the gap that underlines the impossibility of writing The sexual relationship: the question of the other’s love, as caught up in a circuit of exchanging signs-of-love, is never able to receive a definite answer. One can never be sure of the other’s love.
It is, however, this insecurity that compels Hazuki to present so much ‘transgressive’ gifts of her love. As if there can be a gift that can finally ensure the other loves her.
Narra-note 2: The system of sugar daddies is another way in which the impossibility of the sexual relationship is staged. This system constitutes an exploitation by the female subject of the male subject’s desire to be perceived as desired within the Other. The male subject showers the female subject with gifts to enact the fantasy of having the phallic in front of the Other.