My streaming gem: why you should watch New Rose Hotel
Critics balked at the maverick filmmaker Abel Ferrara’s woozy erotic drama when it premiered in competition at the Venice film festival in 1998. A scrupulous adaptation of the short story by the cyberpunk pioneer William Gibson, New Rose Hotel is what we might call a film maudit – unfairly maligned and tragically misunderstood. Since then it’s proven awfully prescient, ahead of its time in its anticipation of our digital anxieties and the way screens generate huge chunks of our day-to-day reality. Best known for his gritty crime dramas like Bad Lieutenant and King of New York,Ferrara here envisions futuristic industrial espionage the best way he knows how – with a heavy dose of lo-fi sleaze, sex and delirium. That said, expect a conventional thriller and you’ll be disappointed – call it instead an existential techno-erotica, one that tackles the nature of desire in an atomized, transactional world.
The story follows
Fox (Christopher Walken) and partner-in-crime
X (Willem Dafoe), two extraction specialists hired by a rival company to lure supergenius Hiroshi (Yoshitaka Amano) away from his current employer. Fox enlists slinky Shinjuku callgirl Sandii (Asia Argento) to set a honey trap sticky enough to draw Hiroshi away from his wife and kids. With hot-red puckered lips, a wispy Italian accent and a kittenish bob, Sandii attracts more than her designated target. Puppy-eyed X soon falls for the vulpine seductress as well. Sandii returns his affections – or so it seems.
Hiroshi we never meet face-to-face; he’s kept at a distance as a two-dimensional object to be tracked and manipulated via the many screens in play. In fact we experience much of the plot through fragmented, grainy video footage and monitors that not only deny us the fuller, clearer picture, but make us question the very things we’re seeing. There’s something of David