New Rose Hotel

Like Hitchcock’s Notorious, that timeless tale (a man shunts the woman he loves into the bed of another man, and in so doing sets about his own entrapment), Abel Ferrara shifts the focus of cinematographic narrative. By accentuating his diabolical world of artifice, employing theatricals and devices of dramaticcomposition, he sets in motion a story from which he only reaps twisted echoes, ever-distant repercussions, smudged traces. The plot involving Sandii’s successful seduction of Hiroshi then becomes a virtual reality which Ferrara reveals like some pre-recorded broadcast, leaving us to fill it out with sights from the vast stock of our own image-memories. He shapes the whole around a black hole (‘The Blackout’), sustained and never entirely elucidated (but what really happened? Maybe nothing at all…), and in so doing makes the notion of lacking, his true subject since Bad Lieutenant, the unwitting heart of his film: what are his characters, film, audience needing? Everything, all and nothing. The Addiction was his most faithful adaptation of Faust and his latest work returns to that story; this time the entire film revolves around the missing part that created it and of which it is composed. New Rose Hotel is an endless loop, an abyss into which we must leap, a black hole engulfing us, a film phantom, a film memory, all the more haunting for being incomplete, fragmented, still to be rounded off.(Frédéric Bonnaud is editor of the French film, music and media cultural magazine Les Inrockuptibles.)