New Rose Hotel

New Rose Hotel

Abel Ferrara's New Rose Hotel, from 1998, is a film maudit that I found to be invigorating beneath its scuzzy surface. Ostensibly an adaptation of a William Gibson short story, New Rose Hotel eschews a linear narrative and general comprehensibility to such an extent most will dismiss this as a bad film. I beg to differ, but can see why it has few champions. Jonathan Rosenbaum lauded its "decadent erotic poetry" and I, too, found it compelling cinema.

Because the film mixes lo-fi surveillance footage of one of its principals with the "action", New Rose Hotel is hard to decipher. I didn't even recognize the talented Annabella Sciorra and Gretchen Mol is limited to a non-speaking role in the murky surveillance tapes. Ferrara's perverse fiddling with audience expectations is epitomized by his casting of Christopher Walken, an accomplished dancer in real life, as a cane wielding cripple. Walken is marvelous as a hustler looking for a big score or, rather, a loser courting disaster because he needs to live with an "edge". Willem Dafoe is more subdued as Walken's partner in crime, but, when their plans have gone awry and he is hiding from his persecutors, he opens up as events of the past flood his memory.

This for me was the most intriguing sequence of the film. Ferrara slightly alters our view of what has gone on before and further scrambles our sense of the narrative, but never gives the audience an 'aha' moment. Asia Argento gamely embodies the femme fatale who leads the male leads to their doom, but there is no big reveal of her perfidy, only glimpses. Ferrara's worldview is too bleak and unrelenting for my dolorous tastes, but I cannot deny his talent. New Rose Hotel finds Ferrara's cinema incarnate in technological residue.