Rent Lost Girls and Love Hotels (2020)

Lost Girls and Love Hotels (aka Lost Girls & Love Hotels) review by Mark McPherson - Cinema Paradiso

Lost Girls and Love Hotel is a film that remains so buried in its quiet and slow sludge of vice that it becomes more agonizing than tantalizing. There was perhaps some great ambition to showcase how a descent into addiction in the back alleys of a city can often be a more introspective ordeal that isn’t as open. But, wow, does this film linger so long on the darkness and keep its mouth shut for so long that it ultimately has nothing of value to say.

The film takes place in Tokyo where the English teacher Margaret finds herself living a life without much going on. She teaches her language to flight attendants by day. By night, however, she frequents love hotels, seeking some sexual thrill when feeling so alone in the city. She becomes so entrenched in her nightly rituals that it’s starting to affect her work, causing her to stumble into her classroom in the morning, making her instructor raise eyebrows.

Margaret soon finds herself getting involved with Yakuza enforcer Kazu. There’s an allure when Kazu admits that he is soon to be married but admits that it’s a marriage more for appearances than anything else. It’s through Kazu that she finds she can really be open and use Kazu as someone to dump her tragic backstory upon for the purposes of exposition. In return, Kazu attempts to help her get over her trauma but ultimately leaves her. From there, Margaret’s life only gets worse, losing her job and friends as she struggles once more to find meaning when she has nothing to gain and nobody to confide within.

Most of this film finds Margaret wallowing in despair. The third act in particular finds her at a point so low that she all but begs to be raped and murdered. And for what? What lesson does she have to learn from all this? To not go to love hotels? To not be bound by the past? The way this film demonizes and places an emptiness on the nightlife scene, it could nearly pass for a Pure Flix film if it weren’t for the Buddha angle of Margaret seeking to be reborn.

But she doesn’t deserve this. After divulging her entire traumatic backstory just makes her seem so undeserving of what follows that it carries as much mixed-to-bad messaging as that of Fifty Shades of Gray, more concerned with showcasing the erotic surface than any of the toxic elements that bleed under the surface. The fact that Kazu seems completely absent for nearly an entire act so she can fall further seems so much crueler when considering he doesn’t swoop in until the last moment.

Whether a commentary on the lack of religious purpose or the aimless nature of sex, this film doesn’t succeed in either purpose, if it even had a purpose. Much like the protagonist, it wanders around trying to find some sense of worth and turns up so little. It’s a tragedy that nothing more insightful came from such a glossy film, ambling more in the neon muck than trying to find some reflection to any of its inky emptiness.